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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



PLAIN THOUGHTS ON 
FAITH AND LIFE 



BY 

WELLESLEY P. CODDINGTON 




NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 






Copyright, 1913, by 
WELLESLEY P. CODDINGTON 



©Ci.A350850 



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CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Self-Seeking 1 

II. Religion and the Home 17 

III. The Abiding Life 35 

IV. Our Divine Touchstone 51 

V. The Impregnable Foundation 67 

VI. Loss OP Conscience 85 

VII. The Movement of the World Toward Christ 

AND Christian Concepts 105 

VIII. A Positive Faith 121 

IX. Roadside Sermons 141 

X. A Glance Through the Open Door 157 

XL Skepticism 175 

XII. Our Work. 191 

XIII. Our Unconscious Faults 211 



SELF-SEEKING 

Thyself and tliy belongings 
Are not thine own so proper as to waste 
Thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee. 
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do. 
Not light them for themselves. 

—Stialcespeare. 

All men seek their own. — Paul, 



SELF-SEEKING 

From that hour of revelation before the gates 
of Damascus to the hour of his martyrdom 
at Kome, Paul presents an example of mar- 
velous courage, faith, and hope. At times, 
however, as he views the vastness of the work 
and the fewness of the workers the profound 
sadness of his soul vents itself in such expres- 
sions as our text : "All men — all men are seek- 
ing their own." His words suggest for our 
serious meditation the universal weakness of 
humanity, the sin of inordinate self-seeking. 
Taking life at its lowest valuation — that of 
the individual happiness — even then the self- 
centered life is a failure. With vast erudition 
John Stuart Mill argued for happiness as the 
chief end of life. Yet he was forced to confess 
that if one should pursue his own happiness 
as his supreme object, he must fail to attain it. 
Happiness, like one's shadow, the more one 



4 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

pursues it the more it will elude his grasp. 
Furthermore, Mr. Mill could find no faculty 
in man having happiness for its end. Man's 
faculty of vision is for seeing. That seeing, 
however, may be attended with pain as well 
as pleasure. Indeed, we see too much to be 
perfectly happy. So with hearing and every 
other power with which man is endowed. 
They may minister to his enjoyment, they may 
add to his sorrow. Both facts and philosophy 
demonstrate that to the one who is forever 
considering self, life must be full of fretting 
and disappointment, envy and jealousy, and 
many vain rivalries. The word "miser'' in the 
original tongue signifies "wretched." In com- 
mon use it designates one who employs his 
energies in turning the world's wealth into his 
own coffers. The two senses of the word are 
not accidental. The Creator has so consti- 
tuted man that such a course inevitably leads 
to such a condition, and the selfish, hoarding 
miser becomes a miserable man. 

What most people need to make them both 
more healthy and happy is more self-denial 
for others. The Christmas time is the happiest 
week of the year because it is the period in 
which each is planning and working for the 
comfort and enjoyment of others. The de- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 5 

velopment of the affections produces the hap- 
piest life, but the affections have all this one 
characteristic, — they all give forth; they have 
their object outside of self. Herein they differ 
from the appetites, which are craving and self- 
centered. The affections in their exercise 
sweeten and ennoble life, while the gratifica- 
tion of the appetites often embitters it. More- 
over, the affections are self -propagating. Love 
engenders love. He who goes through the 
world with a large benevolent spirit finds him- 
self in a great, generous world. With all its 
depravity, there is yet in human nature a re- 
sponsive chord to every exhibition of affection. 
On the other hand, he who wraps his garments 
closely about him and walks shyly out among 
men always with a sharp, suspicious eye, 
watching for the main chance, finds himself 
surrounded by a selfish world of sharpers. We 
find what we look for, and often by our own 
example we bring it to the surface where other- 
wise it would be studiously suppressed. He 
who in a community year after year is so en- 
grossed in his own personal interests as to give 
little or no helpful sympathy to his neighbors, 
in turn alienates them, so that whatever may 
be his gains he is losing day by day the very 
best that is in the world, and that, too, when 



6 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

the Almighty has given him the key to it 

all. 

♦jf <$► ■($» 

But this self-seeking works a far greater 
evil than the loss of the individual happiness. 
That may be counted an insignificant trifle 
compared with the injury which such a course 
inflicts on the personal character. One may 
not more effectually belittle one's self than by 
trying to live to himself alone. It violates 
God's law for the soul's growth — for growth 
means service rather than self-seeking. Dig 
down deep and you will flnd that the founda- 
tions of every fruitful life are in the form of 
a cross. He who adroitly manages to get 
through life with little or no self-denials also 
counts but little as a factor in its uplifting. 
This world is a very coarse one, but human 
character seems to need the brunt of its battles 
in order to its largest growth. It needed a 
lions' den to prove Daniel's faith. Paul al- 
ways appeared at his best Avhen in a shipwreck 
or when facing a furious mob in defense of 
the truth. It was when being stoned to 
death that the angel in Stephen illumined his 
countenance. Luther grew mightily under 
the anathemas of the Pope and when he him- 
self became the storm center of converging 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 7 

whirlwinds from every quarter of the habitable 
globe. The cross may at times seem grievous, 
and one may cry with Cowper's Hypochron- 
driac, "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, 
where rumor of oppression and deceit may 
never reach me more/' Yet, after all, that 
cry is the cry of weakness. The Lord has a 
far nobler mission for us than to be whining 
away our life under some juniper tree in 
the desert. Self-indulgence is always death, 
whether in the individual or the nation. Cor- 
tez told the Mexicans that the Spaniards had 
a disease of the heart for which there was no 
cure but gold, and gold he must have. He 
extorted from them vast treasures, and their 
gold and silver three hundred and fifty years 
ago made Spain the richest nation in the 
world. But the disease was fatal, and Spain 
died long ago — ^died of the glut of self-indul- 
gent wealth and the dearth of great-souled 
men. 

"What shall a man give in exchange for his 
soul?'' Enter the marts of trade and you will 
get many an answer. Esau is the type of a 
great multitude who are willing to barter 
their birthright for a mess of pottage. In the 
Dark Ages it was superstitiously believed that 
certain ones entered into secret compact with 



8 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

the devil, and sold him their souls for certain 
temporal advantages. Three of the world's 
noted dramatists, Christopher Marlow, the 
Spanish poet Calderon, and Goethe, have each 
made this tradition the basis of well-known 
dramas. In form it is a myth of the Dark 
Ages, in substance it is a startling reality of 
all ages. As we study the world the great 
wonder is that in theory men hold themselves 
so dear, yet in practice sell themselves so 
cheaply. There lies a small bundle of papers. 
They are stocks and bonds. They sum up the 
lifework of an immortal man. These are the 
fruit of his toils — the account which he has 
to give of his probation — these and little or 
nothing besides. No holy life, no Christly 
character, no helping hand to the fallen, no 
pleading with the wanderer, no food for the 
hungry, no cheer for the broken-hearted, no 
special interest in the great benevolent insti- 
tutions of the church, no prayer, no Sabbath 
worship, no family altar, no closet of com- 
munion — no, no, none of these, for life was 
business, and business was worldly gain, and 
here it is ! O God ! What a travesty upon life ! 
What an awful trifling with the risks and re- 
sponsibilities of probation ! What shall a man 
give in exchange for his soul? A brief day's 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 9 

selfish satisfaction of his lust for gold. The 
English novelist Bulwer observed, "We should 
never treat money affairs with levity/' Money 
is character ; character is for the most part de- 
termined by one's relations to money. Find 
out how one gets money, how he saves it, how 
he spends it, how he gives it, how he loans it, 
how he borrows, and how he bequeaths it, and 
you will have the character of the man in full 
outline. Nearly all the virtues play about the 
use of money — honesty, justice, charity, tem- 
perance, frugality, generosity, self-denial, and 
humility. Money, however, is only one of the 
symbols of the selfish life. Power or fame or 
fashion, once enthroned as the ruling passion, 
may be equally suicidal. In George Eliot's 
Romola we have a hideous portrayal of the 
self-centered life. There the young Greek 
Tito appears — a brilliant man of affairs, ener- 
getic, talented, sensual, gracious in manners 
and person. His life motto is to get all the 
pleasure he can and at whatever cost, and to 
escape all the pain. He receives abundant 
adulation and achieves conventional success. 
But he lacks genuineness, there is a prodigious 
distance between his head and his heart, and 
we cannot but feel a profound loathing and 
suspicion. At its very core the life is selfish 



10 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

and contemptible. The self-seeker destroys 
both happiness and high character. In this 
world there is nothing more beautiful than 
sacrifice. 



*'■'?'■ "^ 



>- 



With equal truthfulness we may say that in 
undue self-seeking is found the chief source 
of man's sin against his fellow man. He is 
by nature a social animal — alone he cannot 
accomplish. In the vast social mechanism 
the power of each part is multiplied by 
union with its counterpart. In the coopera- 
tion of moral forces one and one make eleven. 
He, therefore, who selfishly sunders himself 
from his fellows in the world's Avork does 
injustice both to himself and to his brother, 
seriously diminishing both the individual and 
the community output. If you and I would 
have our lives tell for the largest and best re- 
sults, we must fall into the ranks and stand 
shoulder to shoulder with those who, in the 
name of the common Master, are banded to- 
gether against every form of iniquity. They 
need us, we need them, and the work needs 
us all. 

The eighteenth century brought out the idea 
of the independence of man. That principle 
came down to us stained with the blood of 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 11 

many a battle. On this side of the water the 
conflict ended with the birth of a great repub- 
lic, while on the other side it culminated in 
the fearful scenes of the French Eevolution. 
The independence of man — that was the mili- 
tant idea of the eighteenth century ; but while 
Jefferson was incorporating this doctrine in 
the Constitution, Adam Smith, in his Wealth 
of Nations, was promulgating its counterpart, 
the interdependence of man. The one prin- 
ciple is the basis of our political compact, the 
other lies at the foundation of our mechanical, 
mercantile, and moral work. Once the indi- 
vidual was the sole maker of his commodities. 
That was the savage state. With civilization 
came division of labor and cooperation, effect- 
ing economy of force and a larger output. 

It is true that, to a certain extent, the Al- 
mighty has put a check on man's consuming 
selfishness. He has made it impossible for 
anyone to separate himself altogether from his 
fellow man. No one may take to himself the 
sole enjoyment of his goods, however much he 
may desire it. In an important sense all the 
world belongs to each. Everything is in mo- 
tion, and all the ends of the earth contribute 
to our present state. The poor man's meal is 
gathered from every quarter of the globe. The 



12 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ray of light falling upon his eye and lighting 
his footsteps has traveled ninety millions of 
miles on its mission of love to him. The heat 
of his cottage fire was stored away in the coal 
beds unknown ages ago. The very mote of 
dust floating in the sunbeam has existed from 
the beginning of time. No man is wise enough 
to write its history. Its wandering no one can 
tell. So in very truth all things come to all, 
and the right is indefeasible. Man's selfish- 
ness cannot abrogate this law of a good Provi- 
dence. The lark or the bobolink rising toward 
heaven and filling all the air with music as it 
ascends may not enjoy the strains so much as 
the little school children passing by, or that 
bed-ridden invalid just within yonder closed 
blinds, and to whom God sends this token of 
his love. He who with swelling pride builds a 
costly mansion may yet enjoy it less than the 
unencumbered child of poverty that passes by 
with a heart guiltless of offense toward God 
and man. 

However, it still holds true that one may 
for a time seize on much more than his share, 
and sin most grievously against his brother. 
That is the history of every good thing which 
God has conferred on the race. Nowhere a 
tear-stained face, nowhere a divided and deso- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 13 

late houseiiold, nowhere a heart crushed with 
a sense of unrequited wrong, nowhere a voice 
passionate in the presence of iniquity, but the 
same sad story is told. Self, self had the pow- er, 
saw its opportunity for gain or indulgence, 
and went coldly on to the accomplishment of 
its Satanic purpose. O, the selfish hours, what 
blistering memories they have! — hours in 
which selfishness conquered love and con- 
science, and we planted griefs and lost great 
opportunity; selfish hours, when the grief 
which we might have assuaged was allowed to 
crush the sweetness out of dear lives, and 
faces which might have shone with the seraphic 
sunlight of holy confidence were turned away 
from us in hopeless disgust. 

Then, too, there are hours which fill the 
heart with sweet memories. We are so glad 
to have lived them. They are the hours in 
which by God's grace we forgot self in the 
cheerful ministries of love to others. Here 
too the history is the same. Wherever sorrow 
has been lightened and life uplifted we may 
trace it all back to that love "which seeketh 

not her own." 

♦*♦ ♦> <$» 

To-day the sky is full of omens. Destructive 
literature is broadcast, a literature which is 



14 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

all ajar with, the present order of things. It 
seriously questions whether, as things now go, 
life is really worth living. In passionate tones 
it denounces man's consummate selfishness as 
the root of the evil. This is the secret of that 
great gTound-swell of muttering discontent 
which to-day pervades the laboring masses of 
the civilized world. It is the protest of the 
many against the few, of the weak against the 
mighty, and however urgently the few may 
press the economic question of production, the 
many discern a much larger issue in the ethical 
question of distribution. 

Man is the onlv animal that trades. Herein 
he holds high preeminence. Here too he faces 
his severest test. Trade may be helpful to 
both buyer and seller. So man may be both 
mercantile and moral. The great temptation 
is to ignore the interest of the other party. 
Then trade becomes a merciless game of wits, 
in which wit wins and under wit is driven to 
the wall. Thus emptied of all humanity, how- 
ever finely it may be phrased, trade is simple 
robberv. It would be well if in addition to 
the pious motto which so often adorns the 
household, "God bless our home,'' the man of 
business might also emblazon on the wall of 
his countinsr-room Lowell's homelv rhvme: 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 15 

In vain we call old notions fudge. 
And bend our conscience to our dealing; 

The Ten Commandments will not budge, 
And stealing will continue stealing. 

Too many exploit society as they do the church, 
chiefly for what they may get out of it. With 
them society means customers and increased 
profits. They wish no compact with the weak 
and the needy, from whom they may expect no 
gain. It is a sad blunder and a crime. We 
shall yet learn that life is more than a matter 
of wages. 

Never before could one so grievously sin 
against his brother as he who to-day burrows 
and buries himself in the miserable little rat- 
hole of a selfish life, for never before did the 
individual bear such close relation to the en- 
tire race. He that lives in the twentieth cen- 
tury inherits and inhabits a world many times 
larger than the ancients. Our eyes may pene- 
trate the works of creation, infinite distances 
beyond the vision of Socrates or Caesar. We 
may whisper under the ocean, across the con- 
tinents, and through the wireless heavens into 
the ears of all men. God has given us our 
probation in the most wonderful age the sun 
ever shone upon. By very necessity we are 
citizens of the world, in touch with every inter- 



16 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

est of humanity. The culpability of the self- 
ish life to-day is limited only by the exceeding 
wealth of its opportunities. In the larger 
light, then, we must confess that for happi- 
ness, for fruitfulness, for character there is 
but one way and but one word. It is the divine 
law of life : "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself/' 



II 

EELIGION A:^D the HOME 

To make a happy fireside clime 

To weans and wife; 
That is the true pathos and sublime 

Of human life. — Burns. 

Type of the wise, who soar but never roam. 
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home, 

— Wordsworth. 



n 

EELIGION AND THE HOME 

''^Go home to thy friends'' (Mark 5. 19). 
So our Lord commanded one whom he had 
just relieyed of a grievous affliction. Possibly 
he saw that in the excitement due to the new 
life the patient needed for a while the quiet 
of his own household. It would give him also 
an hour away from the crowds in which to 
think it all over. On another occasion, when 
Jesus had been discoursing, John significantly 
adds, "Every one went to his own house." 
They had heard great truths and they had 
looked upon a wonderful personage ; now they 
would be alone and ponder upon these things. 
Perhaps also Jesus bade this man go home, 
knowing that for the time the new disciple 
could do his best work in the bosom of his own 
family. Our Lord gave the great commission, 
"Go ye into all the world," but he also added, 
"beginning at Jerusalem, your home city." 

<♦ ♦> •♦• 

Every Christian's life, like his charity, will 
begin at home. Human life has certain great 

19 



20 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

fields of duty. Such, for instance, are busi- 
ness, society, the state, the family, and the 
church. The proper adjustment of these five 
great interests so as to secure the largest re- 
sults in each without the sacrifice of any 
makes the most successful life. The great 
danger is that some one may be allowed to 
outgrow or crowd out some other equally or 
even more important. Everyone is born into 
the world with large temporal responsibilities 
facing him. So it is the duty of everyone to 
work and in some way enlarge lifers utilities. 
Trade, for instance, is one of God's great ordi- 
nances. As soon as man rises above the sav- 
age state he organizes business. For one to 
neglect his secular concerns is a sin, which no 
amount of religious profession can atone for. 
Yet it is also sadly true that business may so 
absorb one's time and energies as to drive out 
all proper thought for one's family. He can- 
not be counted even a worldly success who, 
while amassing great riches, has at the same 
time brought up a neglected, irreligious, and 
profligate family. Many a man struts the 
streets far prouder of his blocks and bank 
stocks than he is of his bovs. Then there is 
the state, having large claims upon the citizen. 
Especially is this true in our land, where the 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 21 

government is vested in the people. No intel- 
ligent Christian man may ignore his civic 
responsibilities. Great moral reforms fail of 
accomplishment and communities are cursed 
with suffering and crime ofttimes because of 
the sinful unconcern of good people. Yet the 
claims of the state constitute only a part of 
personal duty. The excessive prosecution of 
politics to the neglect of home or church is an 
egregious folly. Even in the name of religion^ 
under the impulses of a morbid conscience, 
one may ignore duties to family, society, and 
the state. The extreme expression of this 
error developed in the monastic life. Thus 
to separate oneself from society and with self- 
inflicted torture to spend one's life in useless, 
unnatural solitude is one of the saddest blun- 
ders because inspired by the deepest religious 
sincerity. 

^ ^J^ ^$^ . 

Now, among these cardinal appointments of 
human life is the liome, an institution most 
sacred and central. Ordinarily, no field of 
duty will offer to the Christian man or woman 
such constant and fruitful opportunities. 
This is a field, however, which is liable to be 
seriously neglected. Many infiuences in our 
day tend to destroy the home. There is ex- 



22 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ty^avagance, which prohibits marriage to the 
young, and makes the maintenance of a family 
in respectable style quite burdensome. How- 
ever healthy it may be for a young man to 
undergo the discipline of severe self-denial 
and the struggle with poverty, yet it is by 
no means agreeable to human nature. Such 
chastisement for the time is grievous. And 
when the usages of society call for an expensive 
outfit and a constant strain to keep up ap- 
pearances, certain results will surely follow; 
either a refusal altogether to assume such 
burdensome relations, or the temptation, w^hen 
assumed, to live on ill-gotten gain, or what, 
if possible, is still worse, matrimony is reduced 
to a matter of barter, and beautiful virtue is 
put into the market for the highest bidder. 
Then home ceases to exist while so-called high 
society becomes a scene of the shambles and 
slaughter of the innocent. 

Nowadays we have many clubs and much 
sentimental talk about the artistic decoration 
of our homes, but I submit in the interest of 
honesty and the family that we need most of 
all to get back to the severe simplicity of the 
fathers. We need more homes where wealth 
is too small and settled a thing to care about 
displa^nng itself, and where family respecta- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 23 

bilitj is too well-established to depend at all 
upon the cost and pattern of the furniture. 
Such a home, built on the virtue, intelligence, 
and quiet gentility of its members, wins our 
esteem far beyond all the loud manners and 
garish show of conventional art. Pity that 
such homes are not found on every street. 

A second influence undermining the home 
is our feverish rage for amusements. Extrava- 
gance and amusements are intimately con- 
nected. Expensive living demands excessive 
labor and undue nervous strain to support it, 
and this in turn seeks relief in amusement. 

The Israelites of old enacted a part which 
has been repeated in every generation since, 
when, as the record tells us, they first wor- 
shiped the golden calf, then ate and drank, 
then "the people rose up to play.'' Of how 
many a worldly life in our cities is this record 
a fair epitome! — a slavish worship of the 
golden calf during the day, then eating and 
drinking, then off to the playhouse. Of this 
we may be sure : homes do not flourish around 
a playhouse. Those who furnish the enter- 
tainment there, tricked out in the gaudy tin- 
selry of the stage, are scandalously often the 
shattered monuments of severed and dishon- 
ored households, while their utterances are 



24 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

not seldom interlarded with slurs against the 
sacredness of the home and the marriage bond. 
The multiplication of playhouses forbodes no 
good to the purity and sovereignty of home. 
Argue for it as a great public educator, yet 
it is a stubborn fact that the communities of 
loosest morals are the ones that give it most 
abundant support. Hence this advertised 
teacher of high art has its grandest edifice in 
Paris, where the word "home'^ is not heard, 
and where licentiousness parades itself with- 
out a blush or a reproof under the sanction of 
public sentiment and the protection of civil 
law. - 

Still another factor unfavorable to the home 
is to be found in the mobility of our American 
people. The amazing increase in facilities for 
travel unsettles everybody. Opportunity is a 
great temptation in this as in other things. 
Publicists tell us that there is no country in 
Europe in which the proportion of foreign to 
the native born exceeds three per cent. In the 
United States, the constituent elements of the 
population would go far toward the reversal 
of these figures. We are a nation of ninety 
million Ishmaelites in perpetual motion. We 
repeat on a larger scale the roaming life of 
the North Araerican savage. The tramp is 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 25 

a natural outgrowth of the spirit of the age. 
It requires but little searching to find the tra- 
ditional "oldest inhabitant'' in any of our 
towns. Now, this extreme mobility is not con- 
ducive to the best interests of home. It sepa- 
rates the parents and children. It early 
alienates the homestead, and the graves of the 
fathers soon pass into stranger hands. True, 
we transfer property, in high-sounding legal 
phrase, "to him and his heirs forever.'' Yet 
the very words are a solemn mockery of the 
fact. The growing lad seems nowhere so ill 
at ease as when at home. He chafes for his 
majority and freedom. The spot where he was 
born has no family history and no far-reaching 
ancestral roots and traditions to bind him 
there. Moreover, with the wonderful increase 
of traveling facilities, trade has taken on vast 
dimensions, ramifying the continent and fill- 
ing the land with a great army of homeless 
men, mostly young men, men whose home life 
has been sacrificed to the inexorable greed of 
business. Pity, and as you pity pray for that 
one who must spend his life upon the road. 

Yet another influence making fearful in- 
roads upon the American home is found in the 
loose notions of marriage and the easy divorce 
laws of the land. These baleful sentiments 



26 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

and practices are also largely attributable to 
extravagant modes of living. Plain, honest, 
and intelligent people do not crowd the divorce 
courts, neither do they furnish salacious scan- 
dal for newsmongers. Christ's first miracle 
was performed at a marriage feast. Yet a far 
greater miracle has the Master wrought in 
establishing the sacredness of the marriage 
bond throughout the civilized world. It is in- 
deed one of the most marvelous revolutions 
wrought by the gospel of Jesus Christ. No 
feature of Christianity was more strenuously 
opposed by the ancient pagan. Even to-day 
nearly all amendments offered by infidelity to 
the moral doctrine of Christ favor increasing 
laxity in these relations. Christianity con- 
demns alike simultaneous and progressive po- 
lygamy, whether among the rich or the poor, 
w^hether law^less or under the sanction of in- 
iquitous law. 

^ ')^ '*& 



'JT '*' "-r 



From this brief survey of influences tending 
to destroy the home, let us turn to consider 
some that go to build it up. It goes with the 
saying that if it is to retain the affections of 
its inmates home must he attractive. This 
does not mean that it shall be palatial or 
luxurious. The rich ornaments of art and the 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 27 

numerous gratifications which opulence af- 
fords, though they may enhance its agreeable- 
ness, are yet not the essentials of a beautiful 
home. Indeed, such luxuries may exist in 
stately mansions which inclose and cover up a 
very hell on earth. Home, to be attractive, 
must he a place where harmony reigns, where 
there is the expression and enjoyment of mu- 
tual confidence and esteem. A divided house- 
hold is no home. One can hardly conceive 
of a more unwholesome atmosphere for early 
childhood than that in which it is compelled to 
witness the contentions and criminations of 
the parents. To a child's faith, father and 
mother are embodiments of all good, and the 
suggestion of a suspicion against them is a 
blow to faith hardly recovered. 

Sympathy none the less than harmony 
should be found at home. Far too often is the 
child driven elsewhere by the stately distance 
which the parent may think needful to proper 
parental dignity. We do not naturally go for 
advice to those who are forever and ever find- 
ing fault with us. It is an irreparable loss to 
the child when, from fear of ridicule or re- 
proach, or from a feeling that there is want 
of sympathy between himself and his parents, 
he ceases his filial confidences and goes else- 



28 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

where for counsel and encouragement. It is 
the more deplorable, and I may add culpable, 
since at the beginning nature gives to the par- 
ents the unreserved confidence of their little 
ones. The gracious, patient, and tender sym- 
pathy of a mother has many a time proven the 
turning point in the salvation of a young soul, 
where the unapproachable sternness of the 
father had well-nigh driven it into unwise and 
evil ways. 

Again, if home is to retain its hold upon the 
young, it must have sunshine^ it must be a 
place of laughter and good cheer. Only sickly 
things grow in the shade. We are exhorted, it 
is true, to be sober, yet to be sober does not 
require that one should be sepulchral. We 
were made to laugh and be happy. That con- 
demned criminal on the way to the scaffold, 
with a dark history behind him and a darker 
destiny before him, may reasonably refuse to 
laugh, but a child of God, conscious of his 
sins forgiven, in love and charity with his 
neighbor, and on the way to heaven, has neither 
right nor reason to go through the world with 
a long, cadaverous countenance. If, on the 
one hand, immoderate levity is sin, none the 
less is a long-faced gravity, casting gloom over 
the whole household and quenching all gayety 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 29 

and mirth and laughter. We have read of the 
dream of a bright little boy. ^^I thought/^ said 
he, ^^we children were all in heaven and so 
happy. By and by father came in frowning, 
and said, as he always does, ^Can't you chil- 
dren stop your noise?' So we were all afraid 
and ran away.'' The children — ah! they will 
come all too soon into the region of tears and 
clouds. Let them therefore have laughter and 
sunshine as long as they may, without the 
shadow of a frown from those who are older. 
Man of business, filled and burdened with 
many Vv^orldly cares and perplexities, if there 
is but one hour of the day that you can be 
cheerful and sunshiny, let that hour be the 
one at home, in the midst of your family. 

Yet while harmony and sympathy and sim- 
shine go to make home attractive, there must 
be a far deeper, richer current of influence than 
either of these. Home, above all else, must be 
the nursery of holy character. This is its chief 
function. Was it not for this very purpose 
that the Almighty so made man that he must 
remain longer dependent upon his parents 
than do the offspring of the lower animals? 
One cannot but notice the intimate relation 
between the family and religion everywhere 
asserted in the Bible. During the patriarchal 



30 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

age the father was also priest to his house- 
hold. Christ inaugurated the new dispensa- 
tion as a purely home religion. The first sem- 
blance of a Christian Church seems to have 
been organized by our Lord in a rude little 
cottage on the banks of the Jordan. And for 
nearly three hundred years we have no record 
of its possessing any public church building. 
The founders of this, the greatest nation in 
the world's history, were as distinguished for 
their family religion as they were courageous 
in the defense of freedom. Our Puritan for- 
bears were not perfect, and it is a very easy 
matter to fling at them for the exceeding rigor 
of their religious views, yet we can hardly 
hope that our modern liberal notions will de- 
velop a generation of grander men and women, 
of more uncompromising integrity, and more 
self-denying in the interests of righteousness. 
Perhaps in nothing does this generation more 
widely differ from theirs than in this matter 
of home religion. That was a sad revelation 
elicited by the correspondence of a prominent 
college president in New England. Wishing 
to acquaint himself with the demand for daily 
prayers at college, some years ago, he sent a 
circular letter to the parents and guardians 
of eight hundred and twenty-eight undergradu- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 31 

ate students then in the college. In these com- 
munications he asked if family prayers were 
customary in their households. He received 
seven hundred and forty-one replies, of these 
two hundred and eleven responded "Yes/' 
while five hundred and thirty answered "No'' 
— revealing the fact that five out of every 
seven families there represented were without 
a family altar. 

The church will never reach its highest pros- 
perity until household religion prevails. We 
may concede much to the Sunday school as a 
means of grace to the young, yet, after all, 
the perennial fountain of pure religion is to 
be found in the Christian home where the ark 
of the Lord rests. It would be difficult to 
name any other factor so powerful for good 
over the young mind. Every person bears 
about with him in his face, his tones, his talk, 
his dress, his manners so many indelible marks 
of his early surroundings. No matter if he 
has reached advanced life and has passed 
through all sorts of rough experiences, there 
still abide the ineffaceable impressions 
stamped upon the nature in those early, far- 
off years, when every influence sank deep into 
the soul below the on-rushing tides of after 
life. In view of this tenacity of home influ- 



32 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ences, how sad the effects of a bad home! 
How they cling to and warp the character! 
And what a pernicious harvest springs from 
such a soil! When Goethe first saw Thor- 
waldsen's statue of Christ and his apostles he 
expressed his sorrow that he had not looked 
upon those serene and spiritual faces in earlier 
life; he would, he was sure, have been a better 
man. It is the duty of every parent so to live 
as to place before the little ones of the house- 
hold at least some humble likeness of the 
Master. For if the baneful influences are so 
lasting, none the less hallowed are the mem- 
ories of a good home. "It is never far to 
heaven from a good home.'' There one is al- 
ready in the vestibule. To-day it may be we 
have in mind vivid pictures of the old home- 
stead — the books we read, the games we 
played, and the little stockings we hung up 
to be filled with goodies and all sorts of gim- 
cracks at Christmas time. Then there are the 
more serious scenes — the family altar and the 
father's reverent tone as he read morning and 
evening from the old family Bible and bowed 
in prayer at the throne of grace. There too 
were the mother's womanly loyalty and tender- 
ness to us children in all our little troubles. 
They have long since gone to a better home, 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 33 

yet the memory of them and the sweet, simple 
home life of those halcyon days is to us in- 
expressibly dear. The religious instruction 
there given, the pious example of godly par- 
ents, the family altar and the family Bible, all, 
all stand athwart the way as so many angels 
from heaven to arrest the feet in the down- 
ward way to ruin and help the tempted soul 
to live upright. The seed thus soWn may be 
buried long, the parents pass away to their 
rest, the old house sink into decay, the rub- 
bish of many busy, sinful years may shut out 
the sunshine of God's grace, yet, friends, let 
us never despair of one who in early life has 
been nurtured in such an earthly paradise — 
while in our own families we strive so to live 
that the Saviour shall make our homes, as 
he did that of the sisters of Bethany, the 
chosen place of his own abode. 

May I, in the words of the Master's benedic- 
tion and command, bid you "go home to thy 
friends"? 



Ill 

THE ABIDING LIFE 

Abide with me from morn till eve. 
For without thee I cannot live; 
Abide with me when night is nigh. 
For without thee I dare not die. 

— Kehle. 

Brethren, let every man wherein he is called, therein 
abide with God. — Paul. 



Ill 

THE ABIDING LIFE 

Paul assures us of the fact of a divine 
call — "Let every man wherein he is called, 
. . . abide/' Indeed, it would be strange 
if the Almighty, who has revealed design in 
the least of his creations, should have no plan 
for man "made in his own image.'' It is al- 
together reasonable to believe, as writes the 
poet Lowell, "No man is born into the world 
whose work is not born with him; there is 
always work and tools to work withal for those 
who will." The great blunder is that men at- 
tempt to do life's work regardless of God's 
plan for them. All other creatures seem to 
serve their intended uses; man alone is the 
great lawbreaker, forever getting out of his 
place and, in his self-sufficiency, producing 
discord. He would fain improve upon the Al- 
mighty's plan of things. In various ways each 
reenacts the folly of the French atheistic phi- 
losopher, who with much assurance wrought 
out an improved plan of the solar system, 
whereby, as he claimed, man might have full 

37 



38 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

moonlight all the year round. Hardly had the 
scheme been published when the eminent 
astronomer LaPlace demonstrated that the 
plan proposed, if it could be tried, would re- 
quire but three seconds to bring the entire 
system to destruction. So to-day every path- 
way of life is strewn with the wrecks of self- 
sufficient souls — souls out of order, wandering 
as crazed things out into the dark and pathless 
places, making life a hard and inharmonious 
failure. We may be sure if our lives shall 
prove partial or total failures, it will be be- 
cause we have sinfully forgotten or ignored 
the mission which Infinite Wisdom has mapped 
out for us. The confusion that sin thus works 
in the world has been aptly represented by a 
table perforated with square and round holes, 
upon which are cast at random a number of 
cubes and spheres which, if properly dis- 
tributed, would fit into and fill all the open- 
ings. But by the freaks and whims of selfish 
nature, the round man rolls into the square 
space and the square man falls into the round, 
thus leaving angles which with the utmost 
effort they can never fill. Now, we might 
imagine each of these pieces capable of mag- 
netic attraction, and their Maker by an un- 
seen magnet drawing each to its own place. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 39 

In this we should have an illustration of God^s 
providence over us, helping each bj the draw- 
ing of his Spirit into his right place and work 
in the world. The success of every human 
life will in the end be measured by the degree 
of its conformity to God's plan for it. The 
grandest characters of history have been those 
who were consciously surrendered to God's 
purpose. Moses, Elijah, Paul, Luther, Calvin, 
Wesley, were called and clearly set apart with 
a conscious undergirding of the Almighty, 
achieving their sublime lifework. In the life 
of our Lord there was no drifting nor waste. 
From first to last he could say: "To this end 
was I born, and for this purpose came I into 
the world.'' "I and my Father are one." 

^ ^ ^ 

Observe there is yet another Pauline as- 
sumption even more remarkable. He assumes 
not only a call but a call to every one, "Let 
every one wherein he is called, . . . abide." 
In other ages so much stress was laid upon 
the special call of the ministry that the church 
almost lost sight of the divine call of each of 
its members, the laity, the least and the hum- 
blest, as well as the clergy. We have come to 
see that Providence never intended that the 



40 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

work of evangelizing the world should be ex- 
clusively committed to a religious caste called 
the priesthood. In the larger light every true 
life is a divine ministry among men. It is 
only as our secular concerns promote the 
moral and religious interests of humanity that 
they become worthy of us as rational and im- 
mortal beings. The words of the eloquent 
Starr King are true: "A genuine Christian 
must be either a missionary or a maniac." 
That is, anyone in his right mind, brought un- 
der the empire of these redeeming truths, must 
feel himself sent of God, referring every de- 
sire and every deed to the promotion of his 
kingdom. Herein man most grievously errs. 
He involves himself in a multitude of material 
interests, studying mainly the question of dol- 
lar-and-cent investments and returns, and he 
calls this business. Machinelike he toilsomely 
turns out his work from year to year, till by 
and by the machine breaks down and he is 
borne away to burial. Such work is worthy 
of a machine; the more the better. But work 
whose only purpose is confined to self or to 
financial returns or to social and intellectual 
improvement solely — ^such work, whatever it 
is, is yet unworthy of us. Each day we are 
called of God, and our day's work will be what 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 41 

it ought to be only when it is inspired by a 
definite religious purpose. Like the great 
Paul, turning away from his former selfish 
theory of life, we too must come to the ques- 
tion, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?'' 
Then, with the divine commission, like the sol- 
diers of the Grecian phalanx, every step, every 
energy must move toward that one supreme 
objective, the soul under the quickening of a 
divine inspiration saying to itself, "This, this 
one thing I do.'' 

In interpreting God's call much prayer and 
many considerations will help to form our de- 
cision. Among these one will seriously ask : 
"What work does the world most need? To 
what work am I as an individual best adapted? 
What are the providential openings for me?" 

^ 4» ^ 

Once in our calling Paul exhorts, ^^Therein 
abide loith GodJ' The highest Christian life 
is never incompatible with one's proper work. 
It may be more difficult in certain call- 
ings than in others, just as some dis- 
positions seem naturally more inclined to 
virtue than others, yet it still remains true 
that a most blessed religious experience is 
possible in the prosecution of any work that 



42 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

God calls us to. We may "walk with God'' 
to-day as truly as did Noah and Abraham and 
Enoch of old. It is a well-known fact that 
the mind may entertain several chains of 
thought and feeling at practically the same 
time. Thus the speaker may be constructing 
his argument and selecting words appropriate 
for its expression, while at the same time sen- 
sitively aware of the presence and attitude of 
his audience. We sit in our homes reading the 
news of the world while pleasantly conscious 
of the presence of those we love. In this double 
sense, then, we may abide with God in our 
work. In the first place, we may be conscious 
of our oneness with Christ in the controlling 
purpose of each day's life, and, secondly, we 
may be habitually mindful of his presence. 
Only then does religion attain its richest mean- 
ing, not only as a life for God, but also a life 
toith God. It is that blessed life "hid with 
Christ in God." The ninth verse of the second 
chapter of First Corinthians is sometimes 
quoted as a description of the joys of the future 
world. Yet it was not so intended by the 
apostle. He tells us that "Eye hath not seen, 
nor ear heard, neither have entered into the 
heart of man, the things which God hath pre- 
pared for them that love him." But he at 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 43 

once adds, "God hath revealed them unto us." 
Though utterly unknown to the natural man, 
to the regenerate heart they are a beautiful 
possession even here. Paul meant it to be a 
description of that heaven which may exist 
here on earth in the disciple's heart. And ob- 
serve, when Paul wrote these words telling of 
a heaven in his soul of which the world had not 
the remotest conception, he himself was one 
of the busiest men on earth, "in labors more 
abundant." In the darkest hour also the child 
of God may walk hand-in-hand with the Father 
without a fear. He may sing songs in the 
night. So did the persecuted saints of old 
"endure as seeing him who is invisible." Read 
the context of this passage and you will learn 
that some to w^hom this exhortation was ad- 
dressed were common slaves — in chains, yet 
assured that they might abide with God day 
by day. That was a wonderful enlargement 
of the religious idea to this laboring, weary 
world. Moreover, the text clearly condemns 
that false conception of religion appearing in 
the ascetic practices of the hermit life. From 
the days of Saint Anthony, who in the fourth 
century of our era introduced monasticism 
into Europe, multitudes of deluded men and 
women have banished themselves from society 



44 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

to dwell alone in the deserts and caves of the 
earth, or have buried themselves in cheerless 
convent cloisters, thinking in this way to 
escape sin and come into more intimate com- 
munion with God. They seem to have forgot- 
ten that the sinless Christ was a man of the 
cities and of unceasing activity in the society 
of men. They forget that divinely affectionate 
prayer, "And now I am no more in the world, 
but these are in the world." "I pray not that 
thou shouldest take them out of the world, but 
that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." 
The Christian character is to be wrought cut 
in the world, the busy, coarse, profane, com- 
monplace world, with its cares and its rival- 
ries, its drudgeries, its struggles, and its losses. 
No man becomes a soldier by simply studying 
books on military tactics. He must have ac- 
tual service in the field drilling him into habits 
of coolness and courage and rapid combina- 
tion, without which all theories of strategy 
must fail. 

In the solitude of his cell one mav become a 
learned theologian, and even an ideal hero in 
holiness, yet, after all, such a life is likely to 
prove quite fruitless and wanting in manly 
vigor. The crowning evidence of the gospel 
is that it can bear the brunt of life's battles 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 45 

and can save man from sin in the world. Not 
only is it possible, but the Master will teach 
us that these very activities, however humble, 
are the ordained means of the soul's strength- 
ening. There is spiritual significance in the 
humdrum and drudgery of our toil. Charac- 
ter comes through commonplace, so the hum- 
blest tasks may be the very "kingdom of heaven 
at hand." But men are weakly inclined to look 
upon labor as a daily vexation and a curse. 
Year after year they toil on under protest, 
while not a tool nor a task, not a stroke nor a 
sale, not a calculation, not a care nor a cross 
but was intended in God's great plan to nur- 
ture in us Christly graces, patience and hu- 
mility and calmness and charity and prayer- 
fulness. 

'^ ^ ^ 

Especially, let us observe, it is this sort of 
religion which abides strong and clean in every 
calling that wins the world. Christianity 
must not only condemn sin in the abstract, 
it must banish it from practice, however finely 
it may dress, however politely speak, however 
protected by law, however society condones, 
and under whatever name it is disguised. The 
supreme proof of religion is personal right- 
eousness. Faith and prayer, creeds and 



46 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

churches — they are all good, they are all 
needed, but they are all "as sounding brass, 
and tinkling cymbals" without the practical 
virtues, honesty, purity, and charity in every- 
day life. "He that saith he abideth in him 
ought also so to walk, even as he walked.'' 
Theoretical Christianity has met the searching 
criticism of the schools and stands entire. 
False interpretations of the Word have been 
discovered and discarded, but divine truth 
abides. To-day the gospel is called upon to 
vindicate its practical value and vitality. Can 
it conquer the depravity of the human heart 
and lead men in the love of Christ to a new 
life? This was the hammer of power in the 
early church. The historian Lecky writes: 
"One great cause of the success of Christianity 
was that it produced more upright men than 
any other creed. Noble lives crowned by heroic 
deaths were the best arguments of the infant 
church." To-day the world needs not instruc- 
tion so much as example. It is recorded that 
in the French Eevolution a certain marshal 
dispatched word to headquarters, "Send me 
at once three hundred men that know how to 
die." To-day the world calls loudly upon the 
church for men, men who know how to live. 
This is the mission of the church, from age 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 47 

to age to re-present the life of Christ, wrought 
in his followers by the Divine Spirit. We are 
to be living epistles, the truth of God, not 
written on paper nor embalmed in the creed, 
but on human hearts, beaming from human 
eyes, bursting from human lips, and preached 
from every hour from a regenerate character 
and godly life. Infidelity, however loud or 
learned, always quails when men are turned 
from sin to righteousness, and in the love of 
Christ lead blameless, useful lives. 

^ ^ ^J» , 

In conclusion, dwell with me for a little 
on the beautiful gospel contained for us in 
this word ^^ahide" The term is a great favor- 
ite with the beloved disciple John, occurring 
much oftener in his Gospel than in the others. 
If, on the one hand, it is our duty to abide 
with God, it is also gracious truth that God 
will abide with us. The strongest promise 
contained in the Bible gives us this assurance. 
In our version it reads, "I will never leave thee 
nor forsake thee." In the original it has five 
negatives, and the learned commentator Dod- 
dridge translates it, "I will never, never leave 
thee; I will not, I will not, I will not forsake 
thee." 



48 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

In a world of perpetual change and decay, 
how does this human heart yearn for some- 
thing abiding. The life which the gospel offers 
is eternal, not a transient phase of faith nor 
an intermittent feeling. The soul that can 
look into the face of Christ and sav, "All mv 
springs are in thee,'' is lifted above the worri- 
some contingencies of mere earthly fortune. 
Our years glide quickly by, our friends pass 
away, and soon we have more cherished ones 
among the dead than among the living. Of 
all that started out with us in childhood but 
few remain with us at middle life. Then, too, 
our possessions take wings and fly away. 
More and more the world recedes from us ; but, 
blessed truth! among all these changes there 
is One that abideth, Christ formed within, the 
hope of glory, "the same yesterday, and to- 
day, and forever.'' 

Moreover, while many things pass away 
from us, we also outgrow many things; even 
if the outward objects remain, yet we no longer 
relish them. Our senses grow dull, our tastes 
change, our ambitions wane, our young loves 
grow cold ; the outward things remain, but we 
are changed; the years draw nigh when the 
grasshopper is a burden and we have no pleas- 
ure in them. With unuttered sadness we turn 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 49 

awaj from them all, deeply conscious that the 
flood of years has rolled between and we have 
no heart for them now. 

Some time ago I visited the old homestead 
where I was born. I went out on the hillside 
where in the sunny days of winter time with 
such a bounding joy I used to coast. Then I 
sought and stood by the brook running hard by, 
where many and many an hour we children 
sailed our little chip boats together. Alone I 
wandered among the old scenes, once my 
earthly paradise. But I was disappointed, and 
with a sense of heaviness that might easily have 
brought tears to my eyes I turned away from it 
all. The old house now seemed not at all invit- 
ing. The familiar lane, along which my little 
feet first traveled out into the world, seemed 
much shorter and narrower than it did then. 
Then, too, the old homestead had fallen into 
stranger hands, and I was there by mere suffer- 
ance. And that mother, who in those early days 
had so tenderly soothed all our little troubles 
and ministered to our childish delights, she too 
had gone to a better home. These scenes had 
no longer a lively interest for me. I found that 
with the years I too had grown away from them, 
making the sense of distance between this day 
and those innocent days of the childhood home 



50 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

extremely painful. And so we grow away 
from the past. But be assured there is one 
thing that abideth. Neither does it decay nor 
do we outgrow it. 

Soon in the course of nature we shall go 
hence to enter upon another stage of being, 
yet this shall abide with us. There we shall 
live not merely seventy years nor seven thou- 
sand years. In that far-off maturity of the 
ages, how small, think you, will appear these 
earthly toys and trifles? Then we shall re- 
member that away back there on the earth, in 
an hour of contrition and holy resolution, with 
much ignorance yet with intense desire, we 
bowed at the foot of the cross. From that hour 
to this, that surrender and espousal have grown 
in importance. That hour was the supreme 
crisis of our earthly life; all the issues of the 
after years have hinged upon it. It is the one 
great act by the grace of God for which every 
day we must feel devoutly grateful. I doubt 
not when from some height of the heavenly 
world we look back upon this, we shall join the 
hallelujahs of the sainted hosts in thanksgiv- 
ing that we were ever led to drink at this 
fountain which is as "a well of water spring- 
ing up into everlasting life.'^ 



IV 
OUR DIVINE TOUCHSTONE 

Subtlest thought shall fail, and learning falter, 

Churches change, systems go, 
But our human needs, they will not alter, 

Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow. 

Yea, Amen! O changeless One, thou only 

Art life's guide and spiritual goal. 
Thou the Light across the dark vale lonely — 

Thou the eternal haven of the soul. 

— John Campbell Shairp. 



IV 

OUE DIVINE TOUCHSTONE 

That was a beautiful scene in tlie temple 
when the aged Simeon, taking the infant Jesus 
into his arms, declared, "This child is set for 
the fall and rising again of many in Israel." 
Then and there it was declared that Jesus 
should be a sort of divine test of values among 
men. The prediction so simply stated has 
stood here in the Book now for nearly nineteen 
centuries. Has history proven it true or 
false? Has the Man of Nazareth proven to 
be such a standard, measuring the stability and 
value of man and his works? Let us prosecute 
that question for a little. 

'^ ^ ^$^ 

Among all the products of human genius 
that political construct called the state is 
doubtless the greatest. Has Christ proven 
the test of national strength and permanence? 
In the long roll of the centuries many nations 
have come and gone. Which have endured 
and prospered, those acknowledging Christ, or 

53 



54 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

those which have not known him? Simply 
to ask the question is to answer it. When our 
Lord walked among men he seemed sublimely 
indifferent to imperial courts and armies. He 
commissioned no adroit diplomatists to ma- 
nipulate the world's state cabinets. He never 
once sought audience with prince or potentate. 
He was no rabid and revolutionary reformer. 
The summary of his daily life was recorded 
in five words: ^^He went about doing good.'' 
He projected no political reforms, never pro- 
posed a civil law, and, indeed, seemed quite 
oblivious to the existence of the great Caesars, 
save only when called upon to pay the cus- 
tomary tribute money. And to this singular 
silence on his part we may add also another 
significant fact, the fact that he himself be- 
longed to a people who had no government of 
their own and might be regarded as a political 
cipher among the nations. Yet in the face of 
the fact that our Lord sought no personal pre- 
ferment or participation in the government, 
and the abject impotence of his people in these 
matters, it is still true beyond all contradic- 
tion that Jesus Christ has proven the deter- 
mining factor in the strength and perpetuity 
of the nations. When these words were ut- 
tered over the infant Jesus mighty political 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 55 

compacts existed, built on other foundations. 
How have they all melted away like the mas- 
sive mist banks of the night before the rising 
sun, giving place one after another to nations 
built on the solid foundations of Christian 
principles! As we glance over the history, 
three distinct ideals appear from time to time 
to have determined the social and civil move- 
ments of the race. These three ideals we may 
term the aesthetic, the economic, and the ethi- 
cal. In varying proportions each of this tri- 
archy has proven a dominating factor in the 

world's life. 

^^ ^ ^ 

The sesthetic stood for the beautiful. It was 
the ideal of ancient Greece, the supreme con- 
ception which gave birth to great art and 
artists, reared the Parthenon, wrote the 
world's great poem, and inspired the world's 
loftiest oratory. It sought the culture of taste. 
It coexisted, however, as did high art in the 
Middle Ages, with widespread moral corrup- 
tion. It was satisfied with the worship of the 
beautiful and a religion of ritual forms. De 
Quincey rightly afl&rmed that the religions of 
ancient Greece and Rome had no more to do 
with morals than with trigonometry and ship- 
building. The pagan priest had chiefly two 



56 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

functions to perform, namely, to supervise the 
sacrifices and interpret omens. He was not a 

moral teacher. 

<♦ ^$* ^$* 

The economic ideal stands for temporal 
values, for power, for wealth, for every form 
of worldly aggrandizement. This ideal was 
essentially accentuated in the Roman empire. 
It wrought its purpose by military conquest. 
In the modern world the economic idea has 
been realized in wonderful discoveries and in- 
v^entions. To-day it stands for mercantilism 

and machinery. 

*t* ^ "^ 

Christ came into the world to live and die 
for the ethical as the supreme ideal, both for 
individuals and nations. No culture, however 
beautiful, no military power whatever its sway, 
no materia] wealth, according to the Great 
Teacher, could prove so firm a foundation for 
the nation as would simple righteousness. It 
was the gospel of the Old Testament reen- 
f orced : ^^t is not by might, nor by power, but 
by my Spirit." "Righteousness exalteth a 
nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." 
That has been a hard lesson for the nations to 
learn, yet the ages have taught none more 
clearly. This hour we may safely say in just 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 57 

so far as the nations have incorporated the 
Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the 
Mount into their life, in so far have they risen 
to power, while those that have built on other 
foundations have either fallen into decrepitude 
or have entirely disappeared. When these 
words were spoken, there was the mighty Ko- 
man empire with a hundred and twenty mil- 
lions of people. Before the march of its 
conquering legions fifteen countries of Asia, 
seven of Africa, and fourteen of Europe had 
fallen. The richest productions of art were 
brought from the ends of the earth to adorn 
its capital. All roads led to Rome. Its Forum 
resounded with eloquence never surpassed. 
The rites and myths of paganism were in- 
trenched in all the current thought and en- 
forced by the hoary traditions of ages ; military 
power, law, literature all combined to estab- 
lish Rome, the mighty and magnificent, on the 
throne of the world. Into such an arena came 
the humble herald of the cross, proclaiming 
simple righteousness better than art, surer 
than diplomacy, mightier than military power. 
To the worldly-wise it was all foolishness. 
But while the self-sufficient Csesars sat robed 
in royal purple on the throne, there underneath 
the seven-hilled city in the underground cata- 



58 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

combs were tlie Lord's despised people, destined 
to inherit the earth long after the palaces of 
the Caesars had crumbled into undistinguished 
dust. 

Then, too, there were the Jews, God's elect 
people, with no political power, it is true, yet 
gifted, even as infidelity is forced to confess, 
with loftier moral and religious genius than 
any other people. They too rejected this Child. 
Coming to his own, his own received him not. 
When a Roman judge demanded of them, 
"What will ye do with Jesus?" in the heart of 
frenzied malignity, they cried out, "Crucify 
him, crucify him !" and in the fanatical zeal of 
their rejection they lifted a prayer — "His blood 
be upon us and our children," Morally endowed 
beyond all others, of remarkably strenuous 
character, of unflagging industry, of peculiar 
commercial shrewdness, and inferior to none 
in intellectual acumen, yet, having rejected 
the Christ, they have come down through the 
centuries a shattered and wretched race, upon 
whom seems to have fallen in awful reality the 
curse which they so blasphemously invoked. 
Driven from land to land, robbed of property 
and political rights, corralled and huddled to- 
gether in the vilest purlieus of the cities, a by- 
word in society and fearfully persecuted, even 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 59 

for their religious fidelity, one cannot but feel 
in contemplating their history that the Jewish 
people are a living commentary on the aged 
Simeon's words, "This child is set for the 
fall ... of many in Israel." 



*> *> 



The truth thus stated has, moreover, just as 
conspicuous illustration in the nations of to- 
day as in those of the past. This hour every- 
where Christ exalts, while without Christ there 
is comparative weakness and decay. It should 
be no mystery to us that to-day thirty thou- 
sand Englishmen in India rule two hundred 
million heathen. The mighty populations of 
Asia and Africa do not with their merchant 
ships sail all seas and command the commerce 
of the world. They have vast territory and 
unbounded natural resources, with multitudi- 
nous populations, yet they do not control the 
world's markets. The reason for this impo- 
tence is in its last analysis a theological reason. 
Without Christ they are without power. Pros- 
trate and poor, they confirm the truth of our 
Lord's warning words, "Without me ye can 
do nothing." It has been justly said: "China 
is the best block of land on this earth, one 
third larger than the United States, with twice 



60 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

the productive power of any other country, 
and with the great natural highway, the Yang- 
Tse, even two hundred miles from its mouth, 
still five miles wide and forty feet deep. There 
is, apparently, no other reason why this garden 
spot of the world should not have controlled 
its commerce'' and stood at the summit of all 
powers save this one: her people have been 
without the uplifting influence of Christ. 



■►> ♦> 



Let us not be misunderstood. Christianity 
does not depreciate the value of aesthetic cul- 
ture and the great economic forces. The gospel 
is not a foe to art. He who paints the heavens 
with such gorgeous colorings, he who could see 
in the lily crushed beneath the feet of the un- 
thinking multitude a beauty greater than the 
adornments of an Eastern monarch, he surely 
does not condemn in us the love and culture 
of the beautiful. Neither does Christianity 
ignore the worth of the world's vast economic 
industries. Machinery, mercantilism, and 
militarism are three factors of stupendous 
power in the development of civilization and 
the spread of the gospel. The gospel simply 
declares that all these in order to be perma- 
nently valuable must be permeated and sane- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 61 

tified by the Spirit of Christ. The nation that 
seeks the aesthetic and the economic to the 
neglect or subordination of the ethical is 
doomed to decay. This universal system of 
things is built on righteousness and for right- 
eousness. No lesson of the past has been more 

clearly enforced. 

♦♦♦ ♦** <* 

Again, how true it is that Christ has been 
the touchstone, the test of the world's religious 
thought, set for the fall of many, that "the 
thoughts of many might be revealed" at their 
true value or valuelessness ! The world has 
always been full of religions. So indestruc- 
tible is the religious sentiment in man that 
explorers have as yet failed to find a tribe 
so brutalized as to be without some trace of 
it. Into a world seething with religions Christ 
came. Silently and steadily as the movement 
of the suu to the meridian he. has gone forth 
conquering and to conquer. Other religions 
have not lacked for all the great human ele- 
ments of success. Religious prejudice, the 
superstition of ignorance, the heart's blindness 
to its own sin, selfish interests, the adornments 
of art, the intrenchments of custom and law, 
the subservience of literature, the superior 
impressiveness of the sensuous over the spirit- 



62 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ual, all the constituent human factors going 
to determine his religious life, yet with them 
all and without the Christ how steadily and 
how surely one after another of the many man- 
made religions have dropped out of existence, 
surviving only as the memory of a dream whose 
fantastic imagery is recalled and studied as 
a phenomenon of mind in troubled sleep! 

Whatever in them conforms to the truth of 
the gospel abides, while the vast remnant of 
their content is cast aside as worthless drift- 
wood in the current of the world's distempered 

fancies. 

^ 1^ ^ 

Next to its sublime conception of God, the 
religion of Jesus Christ differs from other re- 
ligions in its lofty valuation of man. In all 
ages the question has arisen, "What is man?'' 
Five words sum up the world's answers : Man's 
measures have been brawn, blood, brain, bank 
account, and character. In the age of brawn 
Hercules with his club stands foremost. In 
the age of blood some Pharaoh in royal purple, 
tyrant by descent and divine right. In the 
age of brain the philosopher, thinking to reach 
life by logic, building his hopes on science and 
the syllogism. In the age of bank account 
some modern Croesus, sordid and sensual. In 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 63 

the age of character, the world reverently turns 
back across the centuries to the lowly Naz- 
arene, the divine incarnation of truth and love, 
crying, "Behold the man V^ Christ discovered 
man to himself, and in the light of that revela- 
tion the world's table of weights and measures 
has been marvelously changed. To him man 
was the supreme value. "What shall it profit a 
man if he gain the whole world and lose him- 
self?'' Even those who deny the Deity of Christ 
yet confess him the noblest example and in- 
spiration of self-sacrifice for the good of hu- 
manity. The whole world put a market price 
on man and sold him in the shambles. Even 
to-day such mean valuation holds where the 
gospel of Christ is not known. With painful 
slowness, yet surely, under its influence, the 
world has raised its estimate, first of man, later 
of woman, and lastly of the child. To-day the 
Master's appraisement of man is the founda- 
tion of the world's great charities. The nearer 
one approaches to Christ's view and valuation 
of man, the nearer will such a one come to the 
agony of the garden for his brother's redemp- 
tion. Infidelity may call it the growing altru- 
istic spirit of the age ; we prefer to call it more 
of Christ in the world. In the love of man for 
man, the world to-day takes its law and its 



64 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

example from the Man of Nazareth. We are 
sure no such humanitarianism exists where he 
is not known, and we may also assert that 
only where he is adored as Emmanuel, ^'God 
with us/' there such humanitarian effort at- 
tains its grandest proportions, girdling the 
earth with its missions for his salvation. 
Truly, Christ has also been "a light to lighten 
the Gentiles.'' 



♦> >> 



While we recognize Christ as the test of 
national strength, and of the world's religious 
thought, it is of no less vital importance that 
we recognize him as the test of each mmi's 
value. "Thou shalt come again to be our 
judge," so says the creed. This book tells us 
that judgment is already set. It is all true. 
Christ is in the world this hour, our Judge. 
We each stand or fall by him. In him, by very 
contrast, humanity recognizes its fallen con- 
dition, and is brought to the penitence of moral 
shame. In him also by example and precept 
it has light and hope. So in Jesus humanity 
sees both its ruin and its possible redemption. 
The vision of Christ has filled the heart of man 
with a noble discontent, and inspired the world 
with an imperishable hope. Sometimes men 
sit down to calculate what they are worth. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 65 

Then they take out their worldlj^ scales, count 
their stocks and their bonds, their fame, their 
social position, their power. Yes, that is 
worldly wisdom. The great Paul tells us of 
another way. He exhorts each "to think of 
himself soberly, according as God has given to 
each man the measure of faith''; that is, each 
is to measure himself by the truth of Christ 
which has been incorporated in his own char- 
acter. Paul himself adopted this standard, 
and to-day the great apostle towers above the 
Croesuses and the Caesars of his day like the 
mighty Alps above the common level. Ages 
ago there were twelve who followed Jesus 
along the dusty highways of Galilee whither- 
soever he went. There were many called great 
in that day, of great affluence and position and 
power. But to-day it would be difficult for 
you to name twelve men of that or any other 
age so well known and so reverently remem- 
bered as those twelve who walked with Jesus. 
False and delusive all our so-called standards 
may be. Distinctions and worldly gains may 
even be the most fatal fortune that could come 
to us. Achievements splendid in the eye of 
the world may, after all, be not half so glori- 
ous as a kind word of Christian sympathy to 
a sinking soul. At that great assize a cup of 



66 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

cold water in the name of the Master to one of 
hfe little ones may be rated much higher than 
golden chalices brim full with royal wine. 

Even the church has been slow to apprehend 
the truth that Christ is the divine measure of 
values. So it has talked of its large member- 
ship, its ritual observances, its faith in the 
creed, its fasts, its broad philacteries, and its 
long prayers. These are all good, but it mis- 
takes sadly when it measures itself by them. 
It is Christ in us — "Christ in us, the hope of 
glory.'' It is only as we grow up into Christ 
that we may hope to attain unto the fullness 
of the stature of men. Living Christ, in so far 
as he may be re-presented in a regenerated 
human life, that is our privilege and our duty. 
When the quick and the dead shall stand be- 
fore the great white throne, at their true and 
eternal value, then we shall realize that our 
usefulness, our happiness, our character, our 
eternity are all summed up and measured by 
our likeness to that one character, the charac- 
ter of the sinless, self-sacrificing Christ. 



THE IMPREGNABLE FOUNDATION 

If this fail, 
The pillared fiTmament is rottenness 
And earth's base built on stubble. 

— Milton. 



THE IMPEEGNABLE FOUNDATION 

There are certain passages of Scripture 
which in the course of the centuries have 
grown into great constructive principles, basal 
to religious movements and systems. Thus the 
Golden Rule, "Do unto others as ye would 
that they should do unto you," summarizes 
the world's best moral science. The great 
commission, "Go ye into all the world, and 
preach the gospel," is the church's inspiration 
and warrant for world-wide missions. While 
Luther on his knees was painfully ascending 
the sacred stairway at Saint John Lateran in 
Rome there came to him as a new revelation 
that single passage, "The just shall live by 
faith," and this afterward became the war 
cry of the Lutheran Reformation. In like man- 
ner the words, "Thou art Peter, and upon this 
rock I will build my church," have been taken 
as the corner stone of a stupendous religious 
organization. As is well known, Rome inter- 
prets them to mean the primacy of Peter and 

69 



70 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

his successors as God's vicegerents on earth. 
Others make Peter's confession of faith in 
Christ as the Messiah to be the rock on which 
the church should be built. 

Yet a third interpretation may be offered, 
based upon the words, "Blessed art thou, 
Simon Bar-jona: for flesli and blood have not 
revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is 
in heaven." On this rock — the Divine Spirit re- 
vealing the truth as it is in Jesus — on this rock 
"I will build my church.'' The everlasting and 
impregnable foundation of the church is not 
a human personality nor a confession of faith, 
but the Divine Spirit from age to age revealing 
the truth contained in the written and incar- 
nate Word and working in the hearts of men 
a new life. 



>> 4* ♦♦* 



In their efforts to destroy Christianity, its 
enemies have failed to recognize and reckon 
with this divine dynamic. When the Jews had 
compassed the death of the Master and dis- 
persed his few disciples, the chief priests and 
scribes doubtless fancied they had put an end 
to the new religion. There was, however, one 
man among them — Gamaliel, a doctor of the 
law — ^who was far wiser than the rest. Eising 
up in the council, the record tells us, he be- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 71 

sought them to refrain from all persecution, 
saying, "If this counsel or this work be of 
men, it will come to nought: but if it be of 
God, ye cannot overthrow it.'' 

All through the centuries there have been 
men counting Christianity as nothing more 
than a natural development of man's religious 
sentiments, subject to such imperfections as 
inhere in all human constructs, and destined 
to pass away with the increase of intelligence. 
To-day the visitor in the British Museum is 
shown a medal struck off in A. D. 304 by order 
of the Emperor Diocletian, after a prolonged 
period of bitter persecution, announcing to the 
world, "Christianity is destroyed." Yet within 
twenty-five years from that date Christianity, 
in the person of Constantine, ascended the 
throne and became the established religion of 
the empire. Again, in the eighteenth century, 
Voltaire wrote these foolish words : "By the end 
of the nineteenth century Christianity will 
have disappeared from the earth." Yet hardly 
had his ashes grown cold when there opened 
up the splendid era of modern revival, and 
world-wide missionary movement evincing a 
creative energy equal to that of the apostolic 
age. In the early years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury such doleful predictions were ill the air. 



72 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

The great President Dwight, of Yale College, 
records that in his day, "wild and vague expec- 
tations were everywhere entertained of a new 
order of things about to commence, in which 
Christianitv would be discarded as a worn-out 
superstition." Of like import is Mr. Parton^s 
statement in his Life of Aaron Burr, "that 
during Burr's time it was confidently claimed 
that Christianity could not survive two genera- 
tions longer/' Forty years ago the historian 
Froude solemnly announced, "Protestantism 
has failed," and at once proceeded to write its 
epitaph. A little later Professor Goldwin 
Smith declared in the Atlantic Monthly "that 
belief in Christianity as a supernatural reli- 
gion has given way," and thereupon in most 
lugubrious terms foreboded a moral cataclysm 
in human society. 

The scientific world has yet to learn that 
spiritual things are spiritually discerned, that 
the most vital truths may lie hidden to the 
natural man, and even when faintly appre- 
hended may yet be grossly underestimated. 
Christ declared, "The words that I speak unto 
you, they are spirit, and they are life." We 
may be sure, therefore, that so long as the 
Spirit sanctifies and saves men through this 
old gospel, so long will the church "prevail 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 73 

against the gates of hell.'' Clearly, our faith 
does not stand in the wisdom of man but in 
the power of God. With the unprecedented 
increases in knowledge from every quarter of 
creation the gospel still goes forth to the con- 
quest of the world. Account for it as we may, 
the truth which the Bible contains is still the 
truth for which the world hungers and through 
which humanity is being redeemed. Of all 
ages this is preeminently the age of books, but 
among them all there is yet the One Book 
which has royal preeminence. In answer to 
the demand, we are told the press of Christen- 
dom issues five volumes of the Bible or New 
Testament every minute of the working day — 
an average of one for every twelve seconds of 
the laboring hour. These great truths seem 
to be instinct with divine power, challenging 
the belief and commanding the homage of the 
human heart. Yet we make no fetish of the 
Book. It is only a partial record of God's reve- 
lations to man. We may have the record and 
still not know the revelation. We may have the 
letter and not the life of the truth. We may 
have the record and yet egregiously misinter- 
pret the revelation which it contains. It is only 
as the Spirit shines into our heart and illumines 
the page that we come to a saving knowledge 



74 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

of the truth. So while the record has been 
here from age to age, the apprehension as well 
as the acceptance of its truth has been a pro- 
gressive process. Take for instance the duty 
of the church to evangelize the world. No 
responsibility was more plainly enjoined upon 
it in these Scriptures. No loftier missionary 
hymns were ever penned than those of David 
and Isaiah, proclaiming the glories of Messiah's 
reign, when "his name should be known 
through all the earth, and his saving grace 
among all nations." Yet hardly more than a 
century has passed since the inauguration of 
the great missionary movement in the church. 
There too is the duty of toleration. To-day 
that duty is so clear as to need no argument. 
Yet it is a truth only recently recognized either 
in state or church. In the constitution of 
Ehode Island, under the influence of Roger 
Williams, it was for the first time incorporated 
in a state compact. When after long debate in 
the Legislature of Virginia the bill insuring 
religious freedom was finally passed, Thomas 
Jefferson, its author, was so proud of the 
achievement that he dictated this epitaph for 
his tombstone: "Thomas Jefferson, author of 
the Declaration of Independence, founder of 
the University of Virginia, and author of the 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 75 

Bill for Keligious Freedom in Virginia/' He 
had been President of the United States, yet 
counted the authorship of this measure the 
greater glory. The Master had plainly taught 
it both by word and by example, but the church 
through the centuries failed to recognize the 
duty. What the world needed was not a new 
Bible, nor any addition to it, but clearer spir- 
itual vision. 

♦♦♦ ♦^ 4^ 

Now, if, on the one hand, its adversaries have 
vainly thought Christianity about to perish 
when some erroneous interpretation has had 
to be discarded, so, on the other hand, its 
defenders have too often sought for its evi- 
dence and preservation in external and non- 
essential appurtenances. Human nature is 
so slow to put faith in the spiritual and the 
unseen. The intrepid Elijah needed to be 
taught that the Almighty often speaks with 
"a still small voice.'' Zerubbabel, facing a 
stupendous task, must be told that it is "not 
by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit." 
This overestimate of externals was the capital 
error of all JeY>ish history, totally unfitting 
them for the acceptance of a Messiah coming 
without pompous credentials. Historians tell 
us that Admiral Nelson was childishly fond 



76 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

of outward adornments, and that, at the last, 
he lost his life because he would Avear his full 
regalia in the battle of Trafalgar, having thus 
made himself a conspicuous target for the 
enemy. In the church a like passion for pomp 
and ceremony has often proved fatal to a 
genuine spiritual life. The emphatic message 
of our Puritan forbears to the modern church 
is a plea for simplicity in the religious life. 
"With sublime courage and self-sacrifice they 
contended against the surrender of religion 
to ritual. And, believe me, so long as man 
enjoys the sensuous and the beautiful in art 
and in nature, so long there will be need of the 
stern Puritan in society and in the church. 
It is a noteworthy fact that the two periods 
in modern times during which the faith well- 
nigh died out of the world were the twelfth 
and eighteenth centuries, and the countries 
most bereft were Italy and France, where at 
the same time the ceremonials of religion had 
reached the very perfection of magnificent dis- 
play. It is also to be observed that when in 
the third century of our era the church was 
constructing elaborate creeds, and again in 
the thirteenth when throughout all Europe it 
was building magnificent cathedrals for spec- 
tacular worship, in both these centuries its 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 77 

spiritual life was declining. Neither creed- 
building nor cathedral-building can furnish a 
firm foundation for the church. Even the 
chosen people, under the shadow of the great 
temple at Jerusalem, victims of this passion 
for ritual, retained only the husks of their 
ancient faith. Every life, whether of the indi- 
vidual or of an institution, is dependent upon 
the adjustment of its accent. To-day good 
people are seriously debating how they shall 
preserve the faith. In the schools of the 
prophets teachers subscribe to rigid formu- 
laries. But it not seldom happens that men 
continue to observe forms after they have lost 
the substance, and declining in intellectual sin- 
cerity, content themselves with strained defini- 
tions x)t the terms of the contract. We may be 
sure that as words cannot express the deeper 
spirit life, neither can they preserve it. 
Christianity survives from age to age because 
the Holy Spirit in the believer conserves, re- 
veals, and vitalizes the truth. Hence Jesus 
Christ living in the heart of an humble and un- 
learned disciple may be a surer foundation 
for the church than the learned researches of 
theological faculties. Indeed, had not the 
Divine Spirit made these saving truths real in 
personal experience, they, together with the 



78 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

Bible itself, would long ago have perished from 
among men. One of the most singular features 
of human history is the ease with which great 
truths may be lost when once they have ceased 
to live in the heart. There, for instance, was 
the central doctrine of justification by faith, 
clear as crystal to Paul, yet for centuries it 
lay dormant and inoperative in the church 
until, as by a flash of divine illumination, it 
was revived in the heart of Luther. 

To insure the preservation of the truth the 
Roman Church has declared the infallibility 
of church councils, and latterly the infallibility 
of the Pope. In each of these dogmas we have 
fundamental truth imprisoned in a parasitic 
error. The saving truth is not thus committed 
to a single man, nor to any delegated body of 
men. We believe rather that the Holy Spirit, 
working in the hearts of all true believers, is 
the revealer and preserver of the truth — the 
one fundation against which the gates of hell 
shall not prevail. 

The age in which we live is witnessing tre- 
mendous upheavals in society and state and 
church. Institutions and systems all are in 
the swirl. Now, it is the glory of Christianity 
that it both produces and survives change. 
The Koran of Mohammed teaches : "Every new 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 79 

law is an innovation, every innovation is an 
error, every error leads to eternal fire." Hence 
among the Mohammedan peoples there is fatal 
stagnation. Not so the gospel of Christ. It 
proclaims a golden age yet to come, and moves 
confidently forward. Forms and names and 
creeds will change; these are human expedi- 
ents and constructs. Histories and sciences 
change from age to age with increase of knowl- 
edge. Change is not to be feared so long as 
it leaves the foundations intact. Death alone 
is motionless. Life is the prihciple of growth. 
Moreover, we need not fear if the powers 
of the world be arrayed against the truth. 
This has been its attitude from the beginning. 
When on the day of crucifixion the little band 
of disciples stood with trembling faith afar 
off, there were Caesar on the throne, and Pilate 
on the judgment seat, and Caiaphas in the 
temple — enemies all^— and there was the blood- 
thirsty mob surging about the cross. All 
human conditions, public opinion, political 
power, religious hatred, all arrayed against the 
new doctrine; but the foundations were sure. 
Forty days hence tongues of fire should de- 
scend upon that little band of the faithful, and 
they be imbued with power from on high. 
Glance over the centuries, and you shall find 



80 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

like conditions and conflicts arising in each 
and with the same triumphant issue. If in 
the heat of the battle our hearts incline to faint, 
it is wise for us to place the ages over against 
the hour. Lowell's fine words are both good 
history and good gospel : 

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the 

throne — 
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim 

unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 

his own. 

The church, then, is not to exhaust its ener- 
gies contending for outgrown forms and 
theories, but, rather, in this revolutionary age 
to plant itself more firmly on the regenerating 
power of the Holy Spirit in human lives. Ec- 
clesiastical machinery was never so complete 
as to-day. Eeligious and reformatory organi- 
zations compass the globe. Societies and 
guilds summon thousands to conventions 
across the continents and the seas. But the 
church must have more than organization if 
it would burn sin out of man's heart and ban- 
ish it from the earth. 

Paul tells us that prophecy is the highest 
gift bestowed on the church. "Desire spiritual 
gifts," he writes, "but rather that ye may 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 81 

prophesy.'' And again he writes, "Christ sent 
me not to baptize" — no, that is a mere ritual 
service — "but to preach the gospel''; and he 
adds: "my preaching was not with enticing 
words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration 
of the Spirit and of power." The age calls not 
for the ritual service of a priest, but for the 
man of God in pulpit and in pew, in the church 
and in the market place, unto whose quickened 
vision the Spirit has revealed Christ. 

The great epochs of history have been sig- 
nalized by the advent of such prophets, bur- 
dened with a message, men who like the Fore- 
runner, were burning as well as shining lights, 
and who realized to the world that "His min- 
isters are a flaming fire." And the world has 
run to hear them, for men do feel their igno- 
rance, and they do hunger for better things. 
Such a one was Elijah, the Tishbite, suddenly 
projected across the course of history in an 
age of base idolatry, contending for vaster 
and deeper issues than a passing form or 
dogma. Then, again, when the religion of 
Israel had degenerated into a dead formalism, 
and the Pharisee, arrayed in gorgeous robes 
with broad philacteries, crooned his long 
prayer at the corner of the street — then, again, 
came one in the spirit of Elijah, crying, "Re- 



82 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

pent ye, prepare the way of the Lord.'' Still 
again, when religion had suffered eclipse for 
more than a thousand years, another of God's 
prophets appeared in the Monk of Erfurt, and 
later, in the eighteenth century, when a li- 
centious infidelity pervaded all ranks of society 
in Great Britain, and the pulpit had become 
so degenerate that the learned jurist Black- 
stone records that after hearing every clergy- 
man of note in London he could not tell from 
the message whether the speaker was a disciple 
of Confucius, Mohammed, or Christ, then 
again came the Lord's anointed in the per- 
sons of John Wesley and George Whitefield, 
evangels with a great message, born in their 
souls of the Hoi}' Ghost. 



To-day there appear on all sides signs of a 
great ebb tide in spiritual life. With the de- 
cay of long cherished faiths in many quarters, 
there is a strong drift to blank naturalism, a 
naturalism which would reduce the inspira- 
tion of the Scripture to superior natural 
genius, make the incarnation of God in Christ 
a rare attainment of character on the part of 
a pious Jew, the atonement at Calvary a 
beautiful and heroic though purely human 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 83 

martyrdom for righteousness' sake, and the 
new life a highly commendable self-reforma- 
tion. At such a time duty will demand of 
the disciple far more than formal vows, social 
organizations, and ethical exhortations. Be- 
lieve me, no prayer should lie more heavily on 
our hearts to-day than the fervent words of 
Moses to Joshua, "Would God that all the 
Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord 
would put his spirit upon them !" As ambas- 
sadors for Christ this is the secret of our 
power. Contemporaries declared of the saintly 
F^nelon that one could not be in his presence 
a day without wishing oneself a Christian. It 
is recorded of the great Chevalier Bunsen that, 
though at first inclined to skepticism, through 
the influence of his saintly wife he became a 
devout Christian. When he lay dying, sud- 
denly opening his eyes and looking up into her 
face he whispered, "My dear, in thy face I 
have seen the Eternal.'' The Holy Spirit 
working in human hearts, kindling a divine 
illumination, and producing a transfigured 
character — that is the world's indestructible 
gospel, the one perpetual miracle which Isaiah 
predicted, the impregnable foundation of the 
church against which the gates of hell shall 
not prevail. 



VI 
LOSS OF CONSCIENCE 

Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of 
celestial fire. — A line from Washington's copy book when 
a child. 



VI 

LOSS OF CONSCIENCE 

Life is supremely a matter of profit and loss. 
And so it was intended to be. Man was made 
to grow. Like every mote in the physical uni- 
verse, he is in perpetual motion. He can- 
not stand still, he must go up or down, for- 
ward or backward. If forward, it is a record 
of profit ; if backward, of loss. Profit too, for 
the most part, signifies pleasure; loss, pain. 
It is natural, therefore, that men should as- 
siduously guard against losses, and grieve over 
them when they occur. There is one loss, 
however, which it seldom takes into account. 
This is the more singular, since it is the most 
serious one which a human being may suffer. 
This most serious loss is the loss of conscience. 

In the Bible conscience is often likened 
to an inner life. So the author of Proverbs 
declares, "The spirit of man is the candle of 
the Lord"; and, referring to spiritual declen- 
sion, he says, "The light of the righteous re- 
joiceth: but the lamp of the wicked shall be 

87 



88 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

put out.'' In like manner, the ancient Job 
ponders : "How oft is the candle of the wicked 
put out!" "The light of the wicked shall be 
put out, and the spark of his fire shall not 
shine/' In that parable of our Lord represent- 
ing the virgins who were not prepared to go 
in to the wedding feast at his coming, they are 
made to confess, "Our lamps are gone out." 

The logicians tell us a question well defined 
is more than half answered. A brief definition 
of conscience will help us solve the problem of 
its loss. To this question the Scotch phi- 
losopher, Calderwood, answers: "Conscience 
is the reason discovering to the individual ab- 
solute moral law for the guidance of his con- 
duct." With the exception of a single word 
this definition appears acceptable. We do not 
believe man's reason can discover absolute 
moral law. When, however, the Almighty has 
brought it within range, then man has capacity 
to apprehend it, just as he has ability to see 
the sun when the Creator has lifted it above the 
horizon. We may say, then, conscience is the 
reason cognizing moral distinctions, called 
right and wrong. This is the philosophical 
conscience, simple and without content or 
command. It is also incapable of improve- 
ment. As an executive factor in the moral 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 89 

life, however, conscience is a complex of sev- 
eral elements. Here it embraces the judg- 
ment, whose function is to apply the distinc- 
tion to concrete cases and individual objects. 
In the light of reason the judgment affirms 
this is right and that is wrong. Thus it sup- 
plies each individual with a set of moral 
opinions, and establishes rules for his conduct. 
This element of judgment in the conscience is 
liable to error and capable of improvement. 
Accompanying this cognition of moral dis- 
tinctions, and the decisions of the judgment 
as to what is right and what is wrong, there is 
a third element, which is the feeling of obliga- 
tion, the feeling that one ought to do what is 
apprehended as right and not to do its opposite. 
This is the impelling, the authoritative, com- 
manding element in conscience. It puts into 
human language that word ^^ought,'' which 
Joseph Cook pronounced "the weightiest word 
ever uttered," commanding every impulse or 
interest. It is the categorical imperative of 
Kant. The direction of this impulse is always 
the same toward whatever is apprehended as 
right, and always away from what is appre- 
hended as wrong. Its force, however, may 
vary greatly, in one person absolute in com- 
mand, in another abject in weakness. It is 



90 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

always, however, of supreme authority, though 
often with little executive power. This is the 
light that lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world. It is the divinity that speaks within 
us, an inward monitor, the still small voice 
which makes itself felt as an awe and fear of 
Deity. A fourth feature of conscience is yet 
to be added, namely, a sense of approval or 
disapproval. This also is variable in intensity. 
As disapproval, it culminates in the form of 
remorse, which drives its victim to the morgue 
or madhouse. As approval, it is the peace of 
the martyrs, the joy unspeakable. Together 
these four elements form in every human 
breast what we call conscience. With them 
we have heaven or hell, here and hereafter. 

With this brief analysis, ichat is a loss of 
conscience? The first factor, the cognition of 
moral distinctions, is constitutional and there- 
fore unchangeable. As an intuition it is uni- 
versal and inevitable. The second element, the 
judgment, deciding in each case what is right 
and what is wrong, may be improved by use, 
weakened by disuse. Frequently or habitually 
exercised on moral questions, it grows more 
sensitive and reliable. When, however, the 
moral aspect of one's conduct is seldom con- 
sidered the moral judgment degenerates. In 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 91 

like manner when the impulses toward the 
good are continually ignored or smothered 
they too cease to exert commanding influence. 
Slighted and disobeyed, there is a gradual 
withdrawal of the Spirit, its invitations grow 
fainter and fainter, until at the last, in the 
silent council chambers of the Eternal, the de- 
cree goes forth: "He is joined to his idols; 
let him alone," and the soul is in the antecham- 
ber of its own perdition, its lamp is gone out. 
This loss of conscience is subject to law as 
real as the law of falling bodies. The impair- 
ment of the judgment follows a natural law 
of mind — use improving, disuse attended with 
decay. On the other hand, the weakening of 
the impulses and influence over conduct follows 
a law of grace, which conditions all spiritual 
gifts upon certain dispositions within our- 
selves. Is our opinion upon duty vague? It 
is because the judgment has not been enlight- 
ened and constantly exercised upon the subject 
of personal duty. Is the voice of invitation 
from God growing fainter within us? It is 
because — I say it reverently — we compel the 
Holy One to leave us by our own perverse will 
and wickedness. We stubbornly close up the 
only window through which light can come 
to us from on high. The Saviour — incarnation 



92 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

of infinite love — standeth at the door and 
knocks, but lie will enter only at our bidding. 
The Infinite will so profoundly respect our 
personality. 

This law of spiritual declension is as subtle 
as it is real. Sin is an insidious disease. The 
very silence of moral changes leads us to un- 
derestimate them. Noise commands our at- 
tention, while the silent forces of life are 
depreciated. If disease, instead of its noise- 
less tread, should stalk about our streets in 
tangible form, bustling about with the puffing 
and clangor of a steam engine, how like dead 
men we would sit pale with fear, as it entered 
our street or approached our neighbor's house ! 
The eternal din of Niagara possesses us with 
the sense of measureless power, while the in- 
finitely mightier ebb and flow of the great 
ocean tides scarcely attracts our attention. 
Now, the footsteps of decay are never heard. 
Temptation has a voiceless tongue. It is 
without warning, and silent as the lightning. 
Just as in growth the unconscious influences 
are perhaps the most constant and powerful, 
so also in decay the unthought-of dissipations 
of a sinful atmosphere are the most effective 
agencies in destroying character. In view of 
these possibilities, Jesus portrayed the awful 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 93 

penalties of sin with an emphasis unequaled 
by any other religious teacher. 

This loss of conscience is, moreover, a grad- 
ual process, and for this reason also may go 
on quite unobserved. No man leaps at once 
to the consummation of his character, be it 
saintly or satanic. The fortress of the soul 
is taken by stealthy, it may be slow, ap- 
proaches — now a little and then a little. At 
times there may be an eruption of the hidden 
fires, a sudden disclosure of secret habits, 
startling the community, perhaps surprising 
the individual himself, yet the honest study of 
after reflection seldom fails to uncover the con- 
cealed traces of cherished, long-continued sin. 
On the avalanches of the Alps the surfaces 
present the same solid appearance to the sight 
up to the moment of their overwhelming, de- 
structive descent, but far beneath, removed 
from human eye, forces are at work loosening 
every hold of the mighty mass, until but a 
tendril remains, which the shock of a single 
breath may snap. So Satan sometimes works 
in the heart. Yet the movement of spiritual 
declension is not always nor generally that of 
the avalanche. You are familiar with those 
great seas of ice which gather on the sides and 
summits of the Alps, and, extending over miles 



94 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

of surface, move slowly down the slopes, bury- 
ing everything before them — a movement so 
stealthy as to be detected only by the closest 
observation, yet none the less sure, and con- 
stant, and ruinous. That is the process of sin 
in the heart in its most fatal and usual form. 
What wonder then that the Divine Master 
should tenderly warn his disciples always to 
watch, as well as to pray? The history of Ahaz 
affords us a living illustration of this law. In 
the sixteenth chapter of Second Kings are re- 
corded his five sliding steps to the gates of 
perdition. How simple the first step! He 
went to Damascus, we are told, and saw an 
idolatrous altar. The sight of sin is danger- 
ous. Very justly did Bunyan portray the 
pilgrim, when he would escape the City of 
Destruction, as closing his eyes and stopping 
his ears while he ran forward crying, ^^Life! 
Life!'' The lust of the eye is a mighty con- 
queror. It were better for many an one had 
he been born blind — better. Then, too, Ahaz 
not only looked upon the altar of sin, he vol- 
untarily placed himself in the presence of it, 
and that is always a perilous position. It is 
a most pernicious theory that one may enter 
into evil associations and yet remain pure. 
True, the Bible teaches no monastic asceticism. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 95 

"No man liveth to himself alone." Yet, on the 
other hand, it offers no insurance policy to the 
one needlessly entering into such associations. 
"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the 
counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the 
way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the 
scornful." The love of the brethren is here 
recorded among the positive evidences of a 
new heart. The communion of Christ and the 
fellowship of the good are the Christian's high- 
est enjoyment on earth and in heaven. Ahaz 
sought the society of idolaters, and from his 
time to this hour uncounted multitudes of the 
fallen and hopeless warn us to beware of the 
bondage of evil associations. There is an in- 
fernal magnetism in bad company, a continual 
provocation to compromise the conscience and 
the character. To parley with sin is half a 
surrender. No virtue is safe which is not en- 
thusiastic. We may not look upon sin with 
complacency. Like Paul walking the streets 
of Athens, the disciple's heart should burn 
within him over the world's idolatry and folly. 
There is occasion for alarm if one can listen to 
profane or impure language without pain, and, 
it may be, a firm rebuke. Looking without a 
protest upon sin, we shall either, by the grace 
of God, break at once that charm, or, like Ahaz, 



06 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ere long admire and copy it. When sin has 
ceased to pain us it will begin to please. And 
although it is a deformity, a revolting thing 
with no beauty in it, yet nothing is truer than 
that our tastes are conformed to standards 
continually present. Human nature easily 
copies the absurdities and even the repulsive 
deformities of society. Imitation is an in- 
stinct with us. The growth of character is 
largely a process of unconscious conformity. 
Our words, our habits of thought and life, 
are thus thoughtlessly copied. Even our reli- 
gious creeds have thus grown up with us, im- 
bibed, hour by hour, from the moral atmos- 
phere in which we have lived. So a parent 
proves the moral type of children for genera- 
tions. Admiring and copying sin, with un- 
uttered palliations of the act, having once 
erected the idolatrous altar in the heart, then, 
like Ahaz, we will speedily take the remaining 
steps downward. First, worship at the altar; 
then in self -justification lead others to do the 
same; then remove God's altar. Bunyan tells 
us "the other side of the Hill Destruction is 
very steep." Tolerated on the threshold, Satan 
soon leaps to the throne of the affections and 
will. 

Both the subtlety and the gradualness of the 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 97 

process conduce to conceal the fatal effects: 
"Because sentence against an evil work is not 
executed speedily, therefore the heart of the 
sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.'' It 
is surprising how seriously this physical sys- 
tem may be disordered without the individual 
being much inconvenienced thereby. So may 
the character be honeycombed with corrup- 
tion while the individual shall live in compara- 
tive ease with himself and in the esteem of 
his fellow men. If, however, the soul of such 
a one could be exposed with all its investi- 
ture of evil thoughts, desires, and imagina- 
tions, as clearly as the fine garments which 
adorn his person, then, verily, mingling with 
the gay throngs at an elite social gathering, 
one might feel himself in the outer court of 
Pandemonium itself. In our ignorance of the 
reality it is possible for us to live, and hope, 
and even love. It cannot be denied, however, 
that this feature is fraught with imminent 
peril. Very naturally it leads to unconcern 
and presumptuous expectation. There is per- 
haps not a single important fact in life, about 
which men think so seldom and so lightly as 
the moral changes going on in the character 
— a suicidal unconcern, which finds its simplest 
explanation in the insidious, bewitching, 



98 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

blinding influence of sin, drugging the soul to 
pleasant dreams, on the brink of its own de- 
struction. With minutest scrutiny men study 
the symptoms of bodily disease, but decay may 
go on in the character year after year and 
excite no alarm, elicit no examination, receive 
no check. Satan presents sin as only a tempo- 
rary expedient. No one takes it as an everlast- 
ing portion. The first intoxicating cup is the 
whim or the merriment of a moment, perhaps 
an easy way of escaping the odium of a sneer, 
or the appearance of singularity in company, 
or it may be to drown business and social per- 
plexities. That man who utters one word too 
much in trade and double deals is met and 
overcome with the sudden temptation that for 
once it is expedient to falsify. Then a second 
sin is soon at hand as a subterfuge from the 
discovery and penalty of the first. So sin 
takes on the character of a temporary expedi- 
ent, until so often repeated that there is either 
no longer an elasticity of resolution against it 
or a total failure to recognize its guilt. Eqg- 
pedient! No sin is expedient. Perhaps it had 
been well had that term "expedient" been 
dropped from the vocabulary of man in the 
early history of the race. No one so pitiably 
weak as the man of expediential morals, ^^Ex- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 99 

pedientr^ It has been the great bulwark of 
Satan against every righteous reform. It has 
taught individuals and nations to excuse to 
themselves every sin in the dark catalog of hu- 
man crimes. No, no, let us firmly settle this 
in the practical ethics of our lives. Sin is 
under no circumstances expedient. It never 
pays. Or, rather, it always pays. The Bible 
is true — "The wages of sin is death." It has 
wrapped up in it the seed of all disobedience 
and the fire of perdition. Excuse it to our- 
selves on the ground of expediency, and by and 
by sin will assume the form of a circumstan- 
tial necessity or a human weakness to which 
there can be attached no serious result. Once 
its enormity is hidden, the insidious work of 
Satan in the human soul is consummated. 
It approaches the nadir of its degradation — 
"Its lamp is gone out." It is an established 
law in physics that all disorders of a function, 
if not corrected, cease to be functional dis- 
orders and become organic. Thus sin may be- 
come so ingrained in the human soul that, like 
Milton's Satan, it shall freely say, "Evil, be 
thou my good." Our Lord used no exagger- 
ated language when referring to the apostate 
Judas. He said, "And one of you is a devil" — 
not "hath a devil" — but "one of you is a devil/' 



100 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

This brief studv of the loss of conscience 
should suggest the wisdom of examining the 
soundness of our moral judgments. They de- 
termine the course of our daily life. If they 
be vitiated by self-interest or worldly conven- 
tions, the character is in peril. One easily 
declines to the low standards of the world. 
There is, however, no discharge in the Chris- 
tian warfare. We must seriously inquire, not 
how much truth do we possess, but how much 
does the truth possess us. Society has its eti- 
quette, trade its custom, even the worship of 
the church has its forms and usages, and they 
are all exacting. Yet they all need prayerful 
study and sifting. We may be very respectable 
society people, merchants, church men, yet 
dead in trespasses and sin. 

Then, too, we should never trifle with our 
own or another's conscience. In all ages men 
have fought and bled for this right. Shake- 
speare tells us, "Conscience doth make cowards 
of us all.'' Yes, a self-conscious criminal 
cringes before it as before no earthly tribunal. 
On the other hand, the soul aware of its own 
integrity is always bravest. It has inspired 
the noblest daring this world has ever wit- 
nessed. Still, with strange inconsistency, men 
sell it for the meanest price. There is not a 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 101 

cheaper article on sale in the world's market 
to-day. In the imperial office in Vienna there 
is a diamond of great value. That precious 
stone was carelessly carried onto the battle- 
field of Graussen, by Charles the Bold, and 
there lost. The world has counted him a 
wreckless, princely prodigal. But men are 
everywhere rushing into speculation, scram- 
bling for office and for spoil, unconcerned for 
conscience and character as was that royal 
scion for the precious stone. 

Will you, then, carry your conscience into 
your life work? If so, you will find it a costly 
thing to carry through the world. It will cost 
you companions, ridicule, humility, loneliness 
in society, in trade; it may cost you custom; 
in worldly honor it may cost you office ; but it 
will pay. Be sure the one whose conscience 
never costs him anything is carrying about a 
very cheap article. Life, liberty, pursuit of 
happiness — these all may be sacrificed; con- 
science must never be conformed to convenient 
custom, must never be led to the altar of 
sacrifice. 

An allegory, ascribed to Luther, pictures to 
us a missionary meeting of Satan and his min- 
ions returning from their errands of evil over 
the earth. "I dogged a caravan of Christians 



102 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

crossing the desert/' cried one, ^^and I hounded 
wild beasts on them, and their bones lie whiten- 
ing on the sand/' "But what of that?" shouted 
Satan. "They kept their consciences, and 
their souls were saved.'' "And I just now 
espied on the waters a boat full of pilgrims," 
said another. "I flung down a storm upon 
them, their craft was foundered, and their 
bodies lie bleaching in the sea." "But what of 
that?" again exclaimed Satan. "They kept 
their faith, and their souls were saved." "And 
I," said a third, the subtlest of them all, "have 
been many years tempting a righteous man to 
violate his conscience. At last he yielded, and 
I have left him alone in his sin." Then said 
Satan, "Well done!" And the night stars of 
hell shouted for joy while the angels wept. 
It is only an allegory, but in substance it is 
solemn truth. All earthly losses are but as 
the dust in the balances when compared with 
the loss of conscience. All earthly values sink 
into utter insignificance when compared with 
a clean heart. Said a dying man who had held 
high office in the British navy, "Conviction 
does not leave me, but it rests on my spirit 
as a lifeless weight; this hour I would gladly 
surrender all my earthly honors to get back 
to the innocence of my childhood days, saying 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 103 

my nightly prayer at my mother's knee.'' Per- 
haps some one who reads these lines is also 
yearning — 

"O! to go back along the years long vanished, 

To have the words unsaid, the deeds undone. 
The errors canceled, the deep shadows vanished. 

In the glad sense of a new world begun. 
To be a little child whose page of story 

Is yet undimmed, unblotted by a stain, 
And in the sunrise of primeval glory 

To know that life has had its start again." 

Well, blessed truth ! which the divine love has 
revealed to the world, 

I may go back across the years long vanished, 

I may resume my childhood. Lord, in thee. 
When in the shadow of thy cross are banished 

All other shadows that encompass me. 
And o'er the road that is now dark and dreary 

This soul, made buoyant by the strength of rest. 
Shall walk untired, shall run and not be weary. 

To bear the blessing that has made it blest. 

So through the riches of His grace may our 
lamps be trimmed and burning, and we enter 
into the marriage supper of the Lamb. 



VII 

THE MOVEMENT OF THE WORLD TO- 
WARD CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN 

CONCEPTS 

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone. 

Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are; 

Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be. 

— Browning. 



VII 



THE MOVEMENT OF THE WORLD TO- 
WARD CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN 

CONCEPTS 

Were some poor man — perhaps a carpen- 
ter's son — from an obscure village of unenvi- 
able reputation, to stand in one of the public 
squares of Washington and announce that 
when he was dead he would draw all men of 
all climes and centuries to himself, he would 
doubtless be looked upon with pity as a per- 
son of disordered mind. Yet there was one 
who, nineteen centuries ago, to a few Greeks 
wishing to see him actually made such a claim. 
Based on merely human calculation that pre- 
diction seemed quite as unlikely of accomplish- 
ment and as absurd as the one we have im- 
agined. This hour, however, we stand in the 
presence of its undeniable fulfillment. It de- 
mands explanation. There are to-day millions 
of intelligent persons on the face of the earth, 
to whom that fulfillment appears reasonable 
evidence of a superhuman prescience in the 
speaker, and a superhuman power undergird- 

107 



108 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ing the movement. I invite you to consider 
with me for a little this phenomenal movement 
of the world toward Christ and his doctrines. 
How strangely the Man of Nazareth has drawn 
the ivorld to himself in inquiry! Who was 
ever so sought after! When the claim just 
mentioned was first made it was but to a few 
Greeks, asking "to see Jesus.'' To-day un- 
counted numbers in the deepest yearnings of 
the human heart are praying, "We would see 
Jesus.'' And during all these intervening 
centuries what numerous learned councils, 
what high debate, what tomes of volumes, what 
weary pilgrimages, what floods of penitential 
tears, what hours of prayer, what seas of mar- 
tyr blood, what wealth of love and labor has 
this name Jesus called forth! With what 
variety of invention, with what lavish expendi- 
tures has the world sought to know Christ, 
his Avords, his miracles, his character, his mis- 
sion, the mystery of his power, his passion, and 
his person! How passing strange that this 
young Man, the carpenter's Son of Nazareth, 
hardly reaching the prime of manhood, should 
by his words and deeds and death so closely 
connect himself with the minutest and might- 
iest interests of humanity, and after the lapse 
of nineteen centuries that word should be the 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 109 

foundation of state policies, his name the inspi- 
ration of the loftiest educational forces, his 
life man's highest ideal of perfection, and his 
death the hope of the world! How passing 
strange that multitudes of men and women, 
most illustrious for industry, intelligence, and 
virtue, should be found giving themselves to the 
one great business of leading anxious inquirers 
to him ! For thoughtful men who, looking over 
the world's workfields and desirous of making 
the most possible out of their little life for God 
and for humanity, have solemnly consecrated 
themselves — not to science, not to art, not to 
statecraft, not to secular business, but to this 
one work of bringing men to Christ. 

The wonder lies not in the fact of such con- 
secration, for multitudes of deluded ones have 
given their lives to the promulgation of what 
was false and evil. But the emphasis of this 
wonder lies in the fact that such consecration 
to Christ and his gospel is made here under 
the focal light and with the sanction of the 
world's best wisdom. 



Moreover, as Christ himself declared, he 
^^came not to send peace, but a sword," so his 
enemies as well as his friends have sought after 



110 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

him. Uneasy in their opposition, as if under 
the behest of an irresistible fate, they have 
seemed unable to leave him alone. Investigat- 
ing Christ, they have studied with sharpest 
scrutiny former economies, they have ran- 
sacked the long-buried literature of the East, 
they have unearthed the mighty ruins of re- 
mote antiquity, they have enriched the Book 
with an immense mass of historic, linguistic, 
and moral commentary, which, like the types 
and ceremonies of the chosen people who re- 
jected Messiah, nevertheless serve to lead 
others to the foot of the cross. So the Man of 
Calvary has proven an irrepressible factor, 
sure to rise to the surface in all scientific, so- 
cial, and religious movements of the race. The 
eloquent Dr. Channing well said, "The na- 
tional pride of the Jews, the implacable hatred 
of the Sanhedrin, the brutal despotism of the 
Koman emperors, the contemptuous raillery of 
the philosophers, the libertinism and caste 
spirit of the pagan priests, the savage bigotry 
of the masses, the rack, the fagot and the 
bloody games of the amphitheater all, all 
sought this Jesus to kill him.'' And from that 
day to this every murderer, every debauchee, 
every drunkard, every thief, every miser, every 
slanderer, every worldling has sought after 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 111 

this same Jesus either with tears of penitential 
confession, or, like the mob at Pilate's palace, 
crying, "Crucify him I'' Even the hoodlums of 
the street, in the curses falling from unhal- 
lowed lips, every hour and everywhere, must 
publish his name. It is not so with any other. 
So to-day we have not only the prophecy of the 
text, but behind it nineteen centuries of phe- 
nomenal fulfillment. Jesus has drawn all men 
to himself, and to-day is the center — and the 
storm center— -of its profoundest discussion. 

^ 4^ ^ 

But there is a fact far grander than this, 
and equally indisputable. This same Jesus 
has been drawing all men to himself in doc- 
trine. To have made himself the conspicuous 
center of inquiry in all ages was the surest 
road to detection and everlasting infamy had 
he not stood for the truth. We do not question 
the fact that many of the moral precepts which 
he taught had been enunciated before his ad- 
vent. Here it is claimed only that of the moral 
maxims of Christ, recorded in the Book and 
ranging over the entire domain of human duty, 
not one has been reversed by the sifting criti- 
cism, actual trial, and immense developments 
of the intervening ages. Even further, without 



112 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

fear of contradiction, we may aver that among 
all the philosophers, from Socrates to John 
Stuart Mill, not one principle in fundamental 
morals has been added to those of Christ. 

;^ ^ ^ 

Consider for a moment Christ's doctrine of 
God as a being of infinite intelligence and 
goodness. How grandly does it transcend the 
thought of his age, and how steadily the world 
had been growing up to it! Prior to and at 
the time of his coming the great masses of 
men, learned and ignorant alike, were poly- 
theists or pantheists. Aristotle, whose canons 
of exact reasoning have survived twenty cen- 
turies of criticism and change, taught "there 
is one God and many gods, ruling the universe 
often with divided councils." Cicero, the great 
Eoman lawyer, orator, and philosopher, after 
a careful survey of Greek opinions, came to 
the conclusion that all the heavenly bodies are 
gods, and that the earth is the oldest of these. 
Jesus of Nazareth, discarding current opinions 
and the speculations of philosophy, with the 
quiet confidence of complete knowledge, al- 
ways proclaimed one God. 

4» ^ 4» 
There too is Christ's doctrine of the Father- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 113 

hood of God. To us it seems almost a truism 
that the Creator should continue to have an 
interest in his own creatures. And there are 
doubtless many intimations of such a hope in 
the infancy of the race. Yet at the time of 
Christ's advent it had quite ceased as an opera- 
tive influence in the individual life. Pliny, the 
great philosopher of nature, was wont to say, 
"It is ridiculous to think that the Deity would 
be polluted with such a sad and troublesome 
ministry as that of attending to the petty 
affairs of men.'' Reviewing the mournful 
history of man's religious faiths, one cannot 
but feel the truth of Madame de Stael's remark, 
that if Jesus had taught the race nothing more 
than to go to God with those two words, "Our 
Father," in these he had wrought more than 
all human philosophy. 

^ •* 4> 

Still further, how steadily the world has 
moved toward Chris fs concept of man! At 
the advent the four great schools dominating 
the world's thought denied man's immortality, 
teaching, for the most part, that at death the 
soul was absorbed, swallowed up in the abys- 
mal ocean of unconscious existence. What a 
pathetic picture does the great Cieero present 



114 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

after the death of his beloved child ! Ketiring 
to his Tuseulan villa, he there gathered around 
him his learned friends, and sought consola- 
tion for his loss, discussing with them day 
after day this question of the souPs immor- 
tality. He devoutly wished to believe it, yet 
shortly after, in private letters to his friends, 
he expresses the gravest doubt and despond- 
ency over the whole matter. Faith in this im- 
mortality has become ingrained in the thought 
and life of Christendom, impressing upon man 
a profound sense of his supreme value and 
solemn accountability. Paganism held man at 
the meanest value. Infanticide and suicide 
everywhere prevailed under the silent sanction 
of public opinion. At the very hour when 
Christ was blessing the little children, and 
teaching "of such is the kingdom of heaven,'^ 
in Egypt, Greece, and Kome — centers of the 
world's best learning and life — deformed and 
sickly infants were being put to death as a 
duty to the state. This practice, said the his- 
torian Hume, "was very common, and is not 
spoken of by any author of the times with the 
horror it deserves, or scarcely even with dis- 
approbation.'' Solon, the most celebrated of 
the Grecian lawgivers, made provision by law 
for parents to put to death deformed children. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 115 

Public sentiment regarded it as innocent, and 
it was matter of much complaint that the laws 
of Thebes forbade it. Even Aristotle thought 
it should be encouraged by the magistrates. 
Plato also, towering like the Alps above the 
common level in his day, when constructing an 
ideal state, introduces laws commanding the 
destruction of the feeble and deformed. Pris- 
oners of war were slaughtered for mere pas- 
time. So popular were the gladiatorial games 
that the historian Lecky pronounces their 
abolition the mightiest reform ever effected 
by Christianity. The Coliseum at Eome, seat- 
ing eighty thousand spectators, and surpassing 
every other monument of imperial splendor, 
w^as chiefly devoted to such butcheries. Epic- 
tetus, whom certain rationalists in our day 
would compare with Christ, says, "Jupiter 
has opened a door whenever the evils of life 
do not suit you ; you may go out at any time." 
Seneca, Pliny, and Plato approved suicide, 
while Zeno, Brutus, Cato, Cassius, and Demos- 
thenes thus put an end to their own lives. 
Such was the low valuation placed on man by 
the great lights of the pagan world when Christ 
came. We must admit such crimes against 
humanity exist to-day, but we may safely as- 
sert there is not this hour a single state policy, 



116 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

or system of philosophy, within the range of 
civilization but condemns Aristotle and Plato 
and Seneca while approving the teaching of 

the Master. 

♦> "^ ^ 

Closely allied to this was Christ's doctrine 
of the brotherhood of man. Altruism, the 
spirit and practice of sacrifice for others, is 
the crowning idea of our age. But genuine 
altruism is a purely Christian concept. The 
entire literature of the pagan world is singu- 
larly devoid of all those ideas which we call 
philanthropic. Athens, Corinth, and Rome 
were beacon lights of ancient culture, yet we 
might have traversed all their streets without 
finding a single hospital, asylum, or other 
public charity. Publius Victor has left us a 
list of institutions in Rome at the zenith of its 
glory. There are many gorgeous palaces, 
monuments, temples, magnificent mausoleums, 
but we find not a single institution to help the 
poor, the fallen, the sick, and the aged. Turn 
over the pages of the Byzantian Chronicles, 
which contain a catalogue of the public insti- 
tutions in ancient Constantinople. You will 
find there no mention of any agency of mercy 
toward the degraded and the needy. So 
among the unearthed relics of Nineveh and 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 117 

Babylon we discover no evidence of a national 
spirit of humanity. The best that can be 
claimed for them is a clannish care for one's 
kindred and a pride of tribe and race. Homer 
praised piracy, and Aristotle taught the 
Greeks that they had "no more obligation to 
barbarians than to the wild beasts." 

'*$*' '^ '<$>' 

Wonderful, however, as have been the 
achievements of Christ in drawing the world 
to himself, in inquiry and in doctrine, I con- 
ceive the words of the Master to have had 
a much grander reach and meaning. He con- 
fidently claimed he would revolutionize the 
world^s moral consciousness — he would lift it 
into a new life. This was a claim infinitely 
above that of the philosophers. Origen, in his 
day, writes: "I know of but one Phsedon and 
one Polemon throughout all Greece who were 
ever made better by their philosophy, whereas 
Christianity has brought back multitudes from 
vice to virtue." A brief glance at the moral 
conditions of ancient society will convince us 
that under the leadership of Jesus the race 
has made hopeful though halting progress. 
In contrast with its moral corruption, our 
faith and hope gather new inspiration from a 



118 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

glance at the manifold and merciful fruits of 
the gospel in our day. Its high valuation of 
human life, its elevation of woman, its sanc- 
tion of marriage, its establishment of the 
family, its "creation of a vast and multifarious 
organization of charity," its wide dissemina- 
tion of knowledge, its increased remuneration 
and dignity awarded labor, the growing su- 
premacy of the moral idea, and, finally, the 
development of a lofty religious consciousness 
— forces never so potent and so numerous as 
to-day — together constitute monumental evi- 
dence upon which we may build a rational 
religious faith. It was but yesterday the Mas- 
ter stood alone. Philosopher and priest, Jew 
and Gentile, not only rejected his doctrine 
but with the most rancorous hatred combined 
to crush him. To-day millions of disciples 
representing the wealth, the power, the cul- 
ture, and the loftiest morality of the world, 
with humility and unspeakable joy acknowl- 
edge him their Lord and Master. 

^^ ^ 1^ 

What conclusion may be logically drawn 
from this meditation? In the face of the facts 
must we not candidly confess this movement 
of the ages is a manifestation of executive en- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 119 

ergy of God himself? Is not the most natural 
explanation the supernatural? Bergson, in his 
Creative Evolution, argues that the so-called 
first principles of science are value judgments ; 
that is, as judgments they explain the phe- 
nomena better than any other known to us. 
Now, if the hypothesis of Divine prescience 
and power explains the prediction and its 
fulfillment better than any other, then that 
hypothesis is a value judgment of the first 
order. May we not, then, say that the history 
of the Christian centuries affords us a scien- 
tific demonstration of divine claims and char- 
acter of the Founder? May we not also con- 
clude that the most that any of us can do for 
the world is to humbly re-present Christ to it? 
For that work, however, we must have "the 
mind which was in Christ." To be draAvn into 
question about him is not enough. To know 
the doctrines of the creed is not enough. Char- 
acter must be transformed and' we be brought 
into that life "which is hid with Christ in God." 
In no other way shall we accomplish ourselves 
and our work. No power on earth is so win- 
some as a Christly character. Be sure that 
when, with the great apostle, we can say, "To 
me to live is Christ," then we shall also ap- 
proach the grandeur of that apostle's life, 



120 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

Finally, standing to-day in the presence of 
the prophecy and nineteen centuries of ful- 
fillment, is it not reasonable to believe that in 
the Christ of Calvary we have found that 
"power not ourselves, evermore tending to 
righteousness" ? The ages past declare the ages 
to come belong to the Crucified. Twenty-seven 
hundred years ago the prophet proclaimed, 
"He shall see of the travail of his soul and be 
satisfied.'' With increasing evidence may we 
repeat the prophecy, while with the loftiest 
intellect of the apostolic age we may enter the 
world's workfields to-day, dauntlessly avouch- 
ing, "We preach Christ crucified, unto the 
Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks 
foolishness; but unto them which are called, 
. . . the power of God and the wisdom of 
God." 



VIII 

A POSITIVE FAITH 

ealous, yet modest; innocent, the' free; 
Patient of toil, serene amidst alarms; 
Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms. 

— Beattie. 

Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that 
faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it. 

— Abraham Lincoln. 

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to 
and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine. 
— Paul. 



VIII 
A POSITIVE FAITH 

Paul 'could very consistently preach to 
others the duty of a positive faith. His own 
career was an illustrious example of his teach- 
ing. In our generation the subject is not popu- 
lar. Christendom appears one vast Athenian 
market place with babbling crowds, waiting to 
hear or tell something new. Old creeds, like 
old people, are quite ruthlessly brushed aside 
as of little use or interest. Mr. Herbert Spen- 
cer speaks of this movement as a "general thaw 
of theological creeds." 

We easily discern many influences at pres- 
ent tending to this discredit of religious 
doctrines. In Protestant lands freedom of 
thought has produced such diversity of opinion 
as to make many despair of reaching anything 
clear and conclusive on the subject. Then, too, 
the great religious bodies themselves seem to be 
adrift, revising their Bibles and their standards 
with many variant views. Moreover, it is ob- 
served that many who profess very long creeds 

123 



124 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

present quite imperfect lives, while some of 
those who have theological views diametrically 
opposed to each other lead lives alike blameless 
and useful. So the opinion gains ground, 
first, that the absolute truth cannot be known, 
and, secondly, that what one believes is of 
little consequence so far as it concerns personal 
character. At an earlier day this sentiment 
found expression in the oft-quoted words of 
Pope, 

For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight; 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right. 

One finds it also in the flippant banter against 
religious faith uttered by Byron in his ^'Vision 
of Judgment.'' In this vein the German poet, 
in ^'Nathan the Wise,'' represents a Jew, a Mo- 
hammedan, and a Christian in the time of 
the Crusades discussing religious matters, at 
length unanimously concluding that one's 
creed is of no consequence, if only his dispo- 
sition is charitable. In Music Hall, Boston, 
Theodore Parker declared, "It makes no dif- 
ference, if our prayers are only sincerely of- 
fered, whether they are addressed to God or 
Brahm, to Pan or Jove, to the Storm Gods of 
the Kalmuck, the stone image of the savage, 
or to some one of the myriad divinities that 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 125 

swarm in the Nile." They are all, to his mind, 
alike acceptable and answered. 

Then, too, some have seen in the religious 
creeds nothing but sources of bitter contro- 
versy. Mr. Lecky, historian of European 
morals, writes: "Creeds can be shown to have 
been the occasion of all the persecutions, tor- 
ture, and bloodshed which have been perpe- 
trated in the Christian Church since its estab- 
lishment.'' It must be confessed that there is 
much truth in this charge. Yet we fail to see 
in it any condemnation of religious creeds. 
Christ himself clearly foresaw this result and, 
though coming as the Prince of Peace, plainly 
announced, "I come not to bring peace, but a 
sword." Let us ask, "What is a creed?'' Is 
it not a man's or a company of men's settled 
opinion on a given subject? In this way people 
have their political creeds, their social creeds, 
their financial creeds — settled opinions as to 
the nature, value, and management of great 
life interests. With equal truthfulness we 
may assert that men's creeds about their per- 
sonal and political rights, about property and 
social distinctions, have also been a perpetual 
source of persecution and bloodshed since the 
beginning of the race. This appalling fact, 
however, is no argument against creeds in poli- 



126 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

tics and society and business. All wars have 
been fought about settled opinions of some 
sort. Somewhat over a half century ago in 
this country the people of the North held 
firmly to the belief that this Union was sover- 
eign and inseparable. The people of the South, 
on the other hand, claimed that the several 
States had supreme right and might secede 
whenever they saw fit. A bloody, fratricidal 
war was waged over these creeds. We called 
it loyalty to principle and were not afraid to 
die for our faith. Indeed, one could hardly 
claim to be a man had he not some creed for 
which he would willingly lay down his life. 
The man that believes nothing has really 
nothing to live for. The world has no use for 
him. Now, it will hardly do to say that one 
may have a creed on every other subject, but 
none on so important a subject as religion. 
Thomas Jefferson was somewhat of a skeptic, 
yet he has left on record a very high estimate 
of the importance of this subject. These are 
his words : "The relations which exist between 
man and his Maker are the most interesting 
and important to every human being, and the 
most incumbent on his investigation.'' 

If a creed is thus most natural and need- 
ful, what, we may ask, is the value of a creed? 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 127 

You will at once reply, "That depends on the 
truth there is in it.'^ All history proves that 
the man or woman of great achievement is 
the one possessed of a fine enthusiasm. Fruit 
comes of faith — if that be large and lofty 
enough to evoke and focalize all there is in 
the man. It is the strenuous character that 
succeeds. The man that comes to the front is 
the one that has faith to remove mountains. 
The man that achieves is the man that believes. 
And the world gives its homage to the one that 
dares. The Word says, "His ministers are 
a flaming fire.'' On the other hand, we cannot 
greatly respect the one who has no opinion of 
his own, who, like the weather vane on the 
steeple, is veered about with every wind of 
doctrine. Any political party without an issue 
is dead. A significant battle cry, concentrat- 
ing a popular sentiment, is half the battle. 
More than once a popular slogan has decided 
the fortunes of a campaign. None the less must 
a church have its battle flag ; it must stand for 
something. It cannot live long on mere ne- 
gations. At the advent of Christ there existed 
a religious sect whose characteristic doctrine 
was a denial. Of the Sadducees it is especially 
recorded that they taught, "There is no resur- 
rection." They were highly respectable, few 



■^■A 



128 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

in numbers, and soon died out. Talk of a 
church without a creed — as well expect a 
strong government without a constitution, 
science without definition, literature without 
an alphabet, a political party without a plat- 
form, or a grand life without a purpose. A 
man with a message is what the world wants. 
It calls for prophets rather than priests, for 
seers with clear vision, whose call burns in 
their bones, and who "cannot but speak the 
things which they have seen and heard." The 
church is set to teach its best conception of 
Christ, and to re-present Christ to the world 
so far as he may be in a regenerated character 
and life. It is the depository and evangelist 
of the most solemn, sublimest truth ever re- 
vealed to man. When in the ancient days Lu- 
cretius scoffed at all religion as the juggle of 
priests, then the Koman empire began to de- 
cline. When, again, in the eighteenth century, 
Voltaire and the Encyclopedists abjured reli- 
gion as mere priestcraft and declared enlight- 
enment to be synonymous with disbelief, then 
too began the most perilous era of social dis- 
order the modern world has witnessed. Al- 
ways, in the state, the church, the individual, 
a rational faith means power and progress, 
while unfaith means decrepitude and decay. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 129 

Christianity as a system is very positive. 
Its Founder claimed for himself sole authority ; 
he would have no compromise. The Pan- 
theons of the pagan world gathered indiffer- 
ently all the gods of the nations ; not so Christ. 
In the New Testament his oft-repeated and 
characteristic words were, ^^Verily, verily, I say 
unto you," words repeated seventy times over. 
There was no bidding for patronage by com- 
promise or silence. And equally positive was 
the character demanded of the disciple. "Ye 
cannot serve God and mammon.'' "He that 
is not for me is against me.'' "He that is not 
willing to forsake all" — property, friends, 
even life itself — "is not worthy to be my dis- 
ciple." Among the last revelations made to 
John on Patmos was a condemnation of the 
half-hearted and the lukewarm. Concerning 
the church in Laodicea, who were neither hot 
nor cold, the Lord declares, "I will spew thee 
out of my mouth," as one would cast out that 
which was distasteful and offensive. 

While thus commending a positive faith, it 
would be an inadequate presentation did we 
overlook the fact that faith has also its just 
limitations. To believe everything would be 
quite as foolish as to reject everything. A 
positive Christian faith does not prohibit an 



130 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

open mind. Hinduism and Romanism teach 
that a thought of doubt is a thought of sin. 
Not so our Protestant Christianity. We rec- 
ognize the fact that God's revelations both to 
the race and to the individual have always 
been progressive. The path even of the just 
"shineth more and more." One must unlearn 
much before reaching the final truth. Mr. 
Ruskin is credited with saying that he was 
never quite certain of a thing until he had 
changed his mind about it at least three times. 
Our faith does not hunger for change, neither 
does it fear it. It always challenges the light. 
"It buildeth in the cedar's tops and dallies 
with the wind and courts the sun.'' With in- 
crease of knowledge the formularies of the 
Middle Ages may not satisfy the mind of the 
church to-day. An outgrown faith is as use- 
less and grotesque as an outgrown garment. 
Once the church accepted human slavery as a 
divine institution sanctioned by the Bible. In 
the larger light of to-day it condemns it as the 
"sum of all villainies." To-day we may not ac- 
cept the commercial view of the atonement — 
once held by a respectable portion of the 
church — yet we may still devoutly look to 
Christ as our Saviour from sin and death. 
The believer of to-day finds himself confronted 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 131 

with the numerous questions of the ^'higher 
criticism." Questions, we say, for thus far this 
school of thinkers has produced many more 
questions than answers. What shall we do 
with them? Not ignore them, surely. On the 
other hand, even an unanswerable question for 
the time need not wreck one's established faith. 
I confess it does not much disturb my faith 
to be told that in the book which the ancient 
Hebrews called the prophecy of Isaiah there 
are found traces of two or three authors. Even 
should a more extended examination assign 
the book of Daniel to the Maccabean age, yet 
neither the dual authorship of the one, nor the 
altered date of the other, need weaken our con- 
fidence in them as the human record of a 
divine revelation. With the devout and 
learned Principal Shairp we may ask: 

"I have a life in Christ to live. 

And e'er I live it must I wait 
Till science shall full answer give 
Of this or that hook's date?" 

Christianity is the only historical religion; 
that is, it alone appeals to history both be- 
fore and after its inauguration for its cre- 
dentials. When Christ came appeal was made 
to the historic writings of the Jews as pro- 
phetic of his coming and character. Neither 



132 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

the Koran of Mohammed, nor the Shasters, nor 
the Vedic Scriptures, nor the Book of Mormon 
build thus on historic foundations. In this 
regard Christianity is unique. Three quar- 
ters of the Bible is history. Its doctrine is 
embedded in the historic records. Now, it is 
very possible that discoveries in science and in 
the vast underground explorations begun in 
our day may lead to modifications in our under- 
standing of that history. In like manner the 
comparative study of religions will aid us the 
better to interpret the relations of other great 
systems to the gospel. That intellectual sin- 
cerity which Christ demands of his followers 
will then require the church to face the facts 
and change its commentaries. It is now more 
than a century and a half since Semler inaugu- 
rated the modern movement called "Higher 
Criticism." Yet the changes thus far required 
in the attitude of the church and its interpre- 
tation of the Scriptures are far less radical 
and revolutionary than those which Christ in- 
troduced at his advent. To the devout souls 
of that day they appeared the final destruction 
of religion. It was, however, only a seeming. 
To-day, after a lapse of nineteen centuries, we 
still recognize the Old and the New Testaments 
as integral parts of one revelation. The forms 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 133 

of the Old passed into desuetude, but its great 
religious principles, with vastly enlarged sig- 
nificance, remain as fast and firm as the ever- 
lasting hills. 

Again, in estimating the limitations of our 
faith, we will give due consideration to the 
speculative element as well as to the his- 
toric. A positive faith by no means demands 
that one should be equally well assured upon 
every article in his creed. With judicial can- 
dor the disciple must distinguish between the 
essential and the nonessential, between the 
experimental and the speculative. One may 
have unshaken faith in the sinfulness of the 
human heart as portrayed in the Bible, yet be 
unable to accept any of the theories as to how 
sin came into the world. 

With such reasonable limitations in the 
realms of history and speculation it is very 
clear that a proper religious faith will yet 
count some things as settled, settled forever 
and beyond debate. One may be really broad 
and liberal and progressive even though he 
refuse to cast away everything that is older 
than day before yesterday. The child of eight 
years has as firm a conviction of his own 
existence as the sire of eighty. His conscious 
experience long ago settled that fact forever 



134 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

beyond a doubt. If the fifteen hundred mil- 
lions of people on the earth should march 
before him and each deny it, that conviction 
would still remain. A conscious experience 
cannot be doubted so long as the consciousness 
lasts. There are truths which awake within 
us, and which, as Wordsworth has well said, 

Wake to perish never, 

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor 

Nor man nor boy, 

Nor all that is at enmity with joy 

Can utterly abolish or destroy. 

So there are rich experiences in soul life which 
no after-learning can invalidate any more than 
it could abolish for us the alphabet. To those 
who seek, the best things are sure. Changes 
may come in the interpretation of historic 
records and in speculative theology, yet there 
abides in conscious experience, in the great 
truths of the Book, and in the credentials 
which the gospel has wrought out for itself 
during the Christian centuries a firm founda- 
tion for a most positive, rational, and peace- 
ful faith. The Hon. Jeremiah Black, justly 
esteemed one of the ablest jurists that America 
has produced, making reply to a skeptical 
article appearing in the North American Ke- 
viewj used these words : "To one who carefully 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 135 

studies the ease, the proof of Christianity 
becomes so strong that the disbelief we hear 
of seems like a kind of insanity.'' 

I hardly need add that a positive reli- 
gious faith is essential to our highest happi- 
ness. No man may hope to attain to his best 
self while ignoring his religious nature. No 
man can be properly at ease while yet these 
great questions of the present and the future 
remain unsettled. Both the mind and the 
heart demand somewhere a rock foundation. 
Such assurance has always been the secret of 
the martyr's triumph. ^'They condemned us 
to the wild beasts and we returned to our 
dungeon with exceeding joy in our hearts." 
Such was the last message ascribed to the 
youthful Christian, St. Perpetua. Man is so 
constituted that a state of indecision is always 
uncomfortable : it may become torment. When 
the psalmist could say, "My heart is fixed, O 
God,'' then he could shout, "I will sing, yea I 
will sing and give praise." Said Sir Humphry 
Davy, "If I could choose what would be most 
delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, 
I should prefer a firm religious belief to every 
other blessing." Indeed, so needful is faith to 
the human heart that the credulity of professed 
unbelievers has become proverbial. One can 



136 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

easily credit the report that the arehskeptic, 
David Hume, was yet a firm believer in ghosts. 
Men are ready to believe everything when they 
believe nothing. "They will have soothsayers 
when they cease to have prophets, and witch- 
craft when they cease to have rational religion. 
They open the caves of sorcery whenever they 
shut up the temples of God/' 

It is quite possible that some who read 
these lines may feel very sincerely and sadly 
that for them a positive religious faith is a 
sheer impossibility. Often they have coveted 
the serenity and assurance which others seem 
to enjoy. Our differences are so great, both 
in circumstances and in constitution, that he 
who speaks here wisely will always speak 
modestly. Intellectual sincerity requires that 
one shall cultivate the utmost candor with 
oneself, striving for openness of mind to all 
evidence. That, however, is an extremely dif- 
ficult virtue. Prejudices constitute a large 
part of our opinions — ^views taken at second- 
hand with little or no investigation. Then, 
too, our worldly interests and ambitions are 
aggressive, warping the judgment with many 
a bias. To properly limit them means per- 
petual conflict. Indeed, it may be much easier 
to deal honestly with bills and stocks in our 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 137 

hands than with the thoughts and desires in 
our hearts. Still, it is possible for each by 
divine grace to possess a peace of mind passing 
understanding. The promise of the Master, 
"My peace I give unto you," was not limited 
to the first few disciples. Have we ever made 
religion a matter of supreme concern or have 
we found time and given exhaustive attention 
to a thousand other subjects while allowing 
this one to remain unsettled? Here the Bible 
speaks with no uncertain sound. "Seek ye 
first/^ not fame, not a business success and a 
fortune, none of these, but "Seek ye first the 
kingdom of God." It is both unwise and unjust 
to reach conclusions, in such a matter, without 
reasonable examination. We may not hope for 
a profound, joyous, religious faith except we 
give the subject prayerful attention. 

Moreover, to this end it is equally clear 
that one must be true to the truth already 
known. In our day there is a widespread ten- 
dency to emphasize what one does not believe. 
Our unfaiths seem to be vastly more important 
than our faiths. The popular literature of the 
age casts a halo of honor about doubt. Tenny- 
son so glorifies it, saying, 

There lives more faith in honest douht. 
Believe me, than in half the creeds. 



138 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

With, this eminent leadership, the changes have 
been rung upon this "honest doubt" so often 
as to lead one to suppose that the only really 
honest thing abroad is doubt. I submit, if it 
would not be both healthy and helpful to begin 
to talk somewhat more about our honest faiths. 
In the seventy-fourth psalm we are told, "A 
man was famous according as he had lifted 
up axes upon the thick trees.'' Then men at- 
tained fame as destructionists. Verily, those 
days seem to have returned. In our age men 
build great reputations on their ability to 
tear down. It is not a good sign in society 
or state or church. Mr. Burke pronounced the 
leaders in the Reign of Terror "the grandest 
architects of ruin the world has ever pro- 
duced." But their temporary fame has passed 
into eternal infamy. We will not get on well 
if we take up our abode amid the tombs of our 
dead faiths. One would hate to be forever 
studying gravestones and epitaphs. Have you 
not noticed on some hot summer day, after 
meeting a hundred people, each of whom made 
the uncomfortable heat the sole topic of con- 
versation, that then it grew to be several de- 
grees hotter even than the thermometer re- 
corded? This is a psychological fact easily 
explained and appearing in every realm of 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 139 

thought. If we would have more faith, we 
must cease forever and ever accentuating our 
doubts, and begin to live what we believe. 
Paul was a man of mighty faith, but Paul was 
also a man of stupendous energy in the execu- 
tion of his faith. If we would enjoy PauPs faith 
we must come to Paul's consecration. Faith 
and fidelity grow together. When with him we 
can say, ^^To me to live is Christ,'' then with him 
we may also shout adown the ages, "I am per- 
suaded that neither death nor life, nor angels 
nor principalities, shall be able to separate 
us from the love of God which is in Christ 
Jesus, our Lord." 



IX - 

ROADSIDE SERMONS 

Those graceful acts, 
Those thousand decencies that daily flow 
From all her words and actions. 

— Milton. 

There are hermit souls that live withdrawn 
In the peace of their self-content; 

There are souls, like stars, that dwell apart, 
In a fellowless firmament; 

There are pioneer souls that blaze their paths 
Where highways never ran; 

But let me live by the side of the road 

And be a friend to man. 

— Sam Walter Foss. 



IX 

EOADSIDE SERMONS 

The life of Christ has furnished the world 
an illustrious example of the improvement of 
wayside opportunities. He was not cathedral 
or court preacher. On the mountainside, in 
a fishing smack by the shore of Gennesaret, on 
the roadside, at the couch of the suffering or 
the bier of the dead, at the well curb of Sychar, 
or on the way to Emmaus, to a single person 
or to the hungry multitude, to rich and poor, 
outcast or Pharisee, it mattered not where, or 
who the audience, his presence was a benedic- 
tion and his words an uplift to the better life. 
The record tells us how two disciples on their 
way to Emmaus said one to another, "Did not 
our heart burn within us, while he talked with 
us by the way?" And after that conversation 
at the well of Sychar, "The woman then left her 
waterpot, and went her way into the city, and 
saith to the men, Come, see a man, which told 
me all things that ever I did: is not this the 

Christ?" Brief roadside sermons these, but 

143 



144 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

very effective. All of us are thus week-day 
preachers. As with the Master, so with each 
of us, much of life must be spent by the way- 
side. Its crises and grand opportunities come 
to us in our ordinary walks, suddenly and 
often unrecognized. That meeting at the well 
curb, how seemingly unpremeditated on the 
part of Christ, and how entirely unexpected 
by the woman! Yet, in the divine wisdom, 
how fruitful of good to the woman, to the 
disciples, to her fellow townsmen, and to the 
world ! It is often, if not usually so. The fac- 
tors which go to decide the momentous issues 
of our lives are not in times and places where 
we are most clearly and intensely conscious of 
them. The trial moments come and the deci- 
sions are made quietly by the wayside. Thus 
we often decide and enter upon courses of ac- 
tion involving most vital consequences with as 
little sense of the real situation as did that 
woman going to draw water for the midday 
meal. The thoughts and resolutions, the re- 
fusals or consents of an hour sweep the life 
onward for years thereafter upon a resistless 
tide of delightful or dreadful consequences. 
History tells us that Mohammed fleeing from 
his enemy was saved by a spider's web woven 
across the entrance of a cave where he had 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 145 

taken refuge. Benjamin Franklin ascribed the 
turn of his life to th6 casual reading of Cotton 
Mather's "Essays to Do Good." Jeremy Ben- 
tham's philosophy was in like manner the out- 
growth of a single phrase, "The greatest good 
to the greatest number/' which caught his eye 
at the end of a pamphlet. Dr. Moffatt's work 
in the Dark Continent and the glorious career 
of his son-in-law, Dr. Livingstone, in the same 
field, were inspired by the. sight of a placard 
posted in one of the obscure lanes in London. 
Historic examples might be indefinitely multi- 
plied. There is scarcely a mature person who 
reads these words whose life would not furnish 
illustration. Unobtrusive words and influences 
by the wayside have been the little sermons, 
the turning points of each for good or ill. 

Moreover, as all receive, so we are all preach- 
ing sermons by the wayside. Our creeds are 
preached on Sunday, in the symbols and serv- 
ices of church worship. Our characters preach 
all the week. They should agree, both creed 
and conduct, but they do not always. The 
real strength or weakness of a man will show 
itself in his wayside, sudden, everyday speech 
and action, for character, like murder, will 
out. One of these spontaneous outbursts of 
human nature, as revealing the real man, is 



146 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

worth more than whole days of occasional 
parade and ceremony. Shall we say also it 
is vastly weightier in its influence? Moreover, 
the grandeur of one's moral character is not 
displayed by his control of self against temp- 
tations to great crime, to murder or highway 
robbery. One of comparatively low morals may 
govern himself against these. The strength of 
one's integrity will shine, rather, when un- 
moved by solicitations to the slightest and 
most secret departures from rectitude. Moral 
heroism is not most clearly proven when all 
the world is looking on. Almost anybody could 
endure martyrdom on a grand scale. It is, 
rather, in obscure places of self-sacrifice that 
one shall find the loftiest fortitude. Take, for 
instance, the spirit that silently bears ingrati- 
tude, brutality, betrayal. The wife or mother 
who in the night-long watches endures the sus- 
pense and agony of unrequited love, yet nobly 
stands at her post, and, like the dove that 
covers with its wing the poisoned arrow pierc- 
ing the heart, faithfully performs her duty to 
the family, the church, and humanity, while in 
the spirit of the Master she prays, "Father, for- 
give them, they know not what they do." In 
such an one we shall have the finest example 
of Christian fortitude. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 147 

It is this beautiful type of life exhibiting con- 
sistency and sweet reasonableness in the ten 
thousand wayside trials day by day that the 
world wants more than any new theology. 
Verily, he is a poor pleader for the cause who 
is devout in the sanctuary and detestable at 
home, sanctimonious on the Sabbath and 
sordid all the week. Profess what he will, 
loudly and with a long face, yet his character 
will leak out by the wayside and preach the 
louder. It is in the shop and ship, in the store 
and street, on the farm and in the factory that 
the world most needs Christ. In these road- 
side revelations we touch each other at so 
many points that it quite becomes us to be 
modest in our professions and charitable to- 
ward others. 

It is blessed truth, moreover, that, while 
it is our special privilege to meet Christ in the 
closet and in the church, we also as the dis- 
ciples of old may walk with him by the way- 
side. Increased religious life and light shall 
come to us in this way, just as the Master 
revealed himself to the Samaritan woman. 
Some people conceive of religion as an ecclesi- 
astical form; they think of it in connection 
with a sermon, as something inherent in the 
church and its ordinances. They require the 



148 PLAIN THOUGHTS - 

traditional time and place, priests and ritual. 
The message must be couched in peculiar 
phrases and forms. I had almost said if cer- 
tain tones of voice were lacking they could 
hardly be religious. Let us not mistake. For 
each of us the Christian life lies close by the 
wayside of our commonest faculties and duties. 
As in the kingdom of nature, so also in the 
kingdom of grace, the vital truths are on the 
surface. The great duties and doctrines are 
writ in illuminated texts, so that the wayfar- 
ing man, though a fool, need not err therein. 
The Christian life is plainer than the creeds. 
Our stores and shops, therefore, our tools and 
toil, even the sights of the street, with its coarse 
and corrupt human nature, its pride and provo- 
cation — these are not so many things to be 
shunned for the sake of growing Christlike. 
On the contrary, a roadside religion such as 
the Master's will deal with them as so many 
means of grace, both to ourselves and others. 
Let the arena be little or large, questions 
are constantly arising for adjudication. They 
constitute our probation, ordained of Infinite 
Wisdom for our growth in grace. So the world 
becomes God's cathedral and affairs stepping 
stones toward the larger life, and our work 
by the wayside is holy worship. In simple 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 149 

deeds of justice and mercy we may walk with 
God as surely as did Enoch of old, for "what 
doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, 
and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with 
thy God?'' The Christian life is no dissipa- 
tion, no disparagement of life's commonplaces. 
Would that men knew the wondrous accessi- 
bility of Christ. That woman of Samaria, as 
is shown by the context, was looking for the 
Messiah, but doubtless she expected his com- 
ing with some mighty accompaniment of ce- 
lestial pageantry, appearing on the summits of 
Ebal and Gerizim arrayed in supernal glory. 
Little did she expect to find him in the dusty 
garb of a tired traveler sitting at Jacob's Well 
and asking for a drink of water. Happy the 
one who has so far learned the truth that even 
when drawing water for a midday meal she 
may come into communion with the Saviour. 
The story comes to us that when Lafayette 
was confined in a German prison for some 
years, he never looked through the keyhole of 
his dungeon door without meeting the eye of a 
sentinel directed toward him. True, or not, as 
that tradition may be, it is truth of far higher 
importance that the disciples in the humblest 
condition and labor may always look up and 
behold the face of the heavenly Father. In 



150 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

hours of spiritual despondency there was noth- 
ing for you but a little work by the wayside, a 
cup of cold water in the name of the Master. 
Yet, away down there, the Comforter whis- 
pered to your fainting spirit: "Act, work, be 
merciful and honest, force yourself to abound 
in little services, be true to the little knowl- 
edge that you have. That must be right though 
all else be doubtful.'' Then it was that these 
simple ministries by the wayside proved step- 
ping-stones out of the slough of despond, and 
there by the wayside the sinking soul found 
Christ the merciful waiting to meet and to 
strengthen and to save. This Samaritan out- 
cast had sunk far down in a life of sin, vet 
came to Christ and received wonderful reve- 
lation and uplift, as with receptive, open heart 
she listened while offering a cup of water to 
a weary traveler. She did not then know that 
it was the Messiah for whom the nations were 
looking. She saw only a despised Jew, dusty 
and travel-worn, one with whom her people 
had and wished to have no intercourse. Hon- 
oring and lifting humanity anywhere through 
the sweet offices of love, we meet and honor 
the Master. 

In that scene at Jacob's Well we have also 
an example of Christ's method of spreading 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 151 

the gospel. In this age of magnificent church 
building, it behooves his disciples to watch 
carefully lest there be neglect of the humbler 
roadside work. Once let religion degenerate 
into a patronized and fashionable thing, some- 
thing to serve as a claim and introduction to 
good society, a graceful curve of proprieties 
and nothing more, then, heedless of its creeds 
and cathedrals, the great masses will drift 
away from it as if belonging to a sphere of life 
not their own. By the operation of natural 
law, doubtless, society will always divide into 
classes. Differing capacities, conditions, and 
employments will in the future, as in the past, 
produce class sympathies and affiliations. As 
social beings men will continue to form circles 
and clans. But human nature, throughout all 
history, displays an extreme tendency to self- 
ish and unjust caste, to distinctions founded 
on inferior standard, such as physical strength, 
blood, color, family. So to-day the refined 
and the rich and the fashionable fall into 
cliques by the natural gravitation of their 
tastes, their pursuits, and their possessions, 
while the less favored shrink from such associ- 
ations and enter others less mortifying to their 
pride and more congenial to their tastes and 
station. Yet neither the rich nor the poor as 



152 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

a class accomplish themselves best when thus 
separated the one from the other. Under 
such conditions the rich will weakly incline to 
greater self-indulgence and the lack of healthy 
human sympathies, while the less favored will 
yield to a morbid sensitiveness, to jealousy 
and unjust suspicion. Now, poverty is no 
crime, neither is wealth; either one may be a 
disgrace, either one may be honorable. 

Moreover, it is not wise to be carried away 
with visionary and drastic schemes for the 
reconstruction of society on a dead level of 
equality. That is neither natural, nor possible, 
nor desirable. It is the duty of the Christian 
Church to nurture a helpful sympathy and an 
honest fellowship that shall, like the Master, 
pass below outward conditions to what is true 
and beautiful and good in man. The age of 
religious persecution is passed, the age of 
polite Christianity is come. To-day we need 
to bevrare lest our very magnificence shall 
prove so many hindrances rather than helps to 
win the world to Christ. However widely a 
Pharisaic exclusiveness may prevail in the 
world, no pageantry of church service, no pride 
of station, no gorgeous equipages, no patron- 
izing airs among Christians should ever bar 
the doors of God's house against the worthy 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 153 

poor. Christianity stands in its high office and 
in the name of God the common Father and 
the lowly Christ of Nazareth, our common 
Saviour, condemns such exclusiveness. When 
the Master lived among men "the common peo- 
ple heard him gladly/' The wayside life of 
Jesus and his sermon to an outcast woman at 
Jacob's Well is an impressive lesson to the 
modern church in, the flood time of its worldly 
prosperity. This gospel is no respecter of per- 
sons, and we may trust as his disciples more 
and more perfectly to attain to the "mind 
which was in Christ" that in the fervent heat 
of their love they will be melted into unity with 
all men and with Christ their common Lord. 
In that scene at Jacob's Well we also have 
an eminent example of the value of personal 
effort. Overleaping all social and sectarian 
limits, Jesus in personal conversation led this 
lowly seeker into the light of a new life. The 
world, we are sure, is not to be saved by whole- 
sale, but by individual effort with individuals. 
James and John, Matthew and Nathanael, 
Andrew and Peter were brought to Christ by 
personal effort. Saul was led by the prayers 
and counsels of Ananias ; the jailer and family 
by Paul and Silas; Cornelius by Peter; the 
eunuch by Philip. Everywhere it is the in- 



154 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

dividual workman that is honored. Moreover, 
the first impulse of a converted soul is to win 
others. Everyone born into the kingdom is 
a propagandist. It was very natural, as the 
record tells us, that the woman should hasten 
back to the village to tell everybody she had 
found the Messiah. 

We are told that when his disciples came 
back they marveled that he talked with the 
woman. In his zeal to save a soul he had ig- 
nored the suggestions of social pride and con- 
vention. Think of it ! The Son of God enunci- 
ating truths of eternal significance, preaching 
to a single hearer, and that hearer a fallen 
woman, a despised inhabitant of a mean city ! 
No wonder the disciples marveled. Yet we are 
told none of them dared ask him why he talked 
with the woman. It is a wonder the impulsive 
Peter did not. I imagine he stood by and 
looked askance, now at the woman and then 
at the Master. Perhaps, shrugging his shoul- 
ders, he muttered to himself: "Ah, this will 
never do! What can it mean! What a dis- 
grace!" And then a sly doubt crept into his 
heart whether that strange personage who 
would talk with the Samaritan outcast by the 
wayside were really the Messiah foretold by 
the prophets, the anointed of God, who should 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 155 

redeem Israel. Yet the Master yearned for 
that inquiring soul and poured into its opening 
door the light of a great revelation, and that 
well curb at Sychar became an ideal pulpit for 
the world, teaching all generations the su- 
preme value of personal effort in saving souls. 



A GLANCE THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR 

Heaven open'd wide 
Her ever during gates, harmonious sound, 
On golden hinges moving. — Milton, 



A GLANCE THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR 

When our Lord ascended to heaven lie 
opened the door and left it open. On that Sab- 
bath morning when the Master, leading his 
disciples out as far as to Bethany, was there 
parted from them, their vision was not as yet 
quickened to behold that door. Among the 
wonderful apocalyptic visions of his maturer 
spiritual life the revelator records the fact, 
^^I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in 
heaven." Wise will it be for us, reverently 
to turn our eyes toward that open door. 

4^ '^ 4^ 

Somewhere in his lectures on "Cloud Beauty'' 
Mr. Ruskin declares that ninety-five of every 
hundred Englishmen never look above the level 
of their eyebrows. This, however, is a weak- 
ness of human nature everywhere, notwith- 
standing the Creator bestowed upon man an 
erect posture, and attached to the human eye 
a muscle whereby he might look upward. He 

159 



160 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

also set apart one day in seven in which man's 
thoughts should rise reverently heavenward, 
and every graceful church spire to-day points 
thither as a silent monitor both of this privilege 
and duty. 

At times it is objected that the Christian 
pulpit deals too much with the invisible things 
of the future life and too little with the stern 
realities which confront us here and now. 
Certainly, a ministry that fails to recognize 
these earthly conditions and conflicts would 
have no sanction from the Master. The gos- 
pel of Jesus Christ is eminently practical. On 
every page it accentuates the duty of the pres- 
ent hour. When the disciples came to our 
Lord with curious questions about the end of 
the world and the details of the life to come, 
he did not deign to gratify their curiosity. 
His only reply, "Be ye ready," was a solemn 
injunction to a correct everyday life as the 
best surety for the life beyond. The Sermon 
on the Mount from the beginning to the end is 
a series of practical precepts. Of the Ten Com- 
mandmefits six enjoin duties of man to man, 
while but four have reference to the more spe- 
cific duties of man to God. In its meagerness 
of detail concerning the life beyond Christi- 
anity differs widely from other religious sys- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 161 

terns, such as Mohammedanism and modern 
Spiritualism. Mankind has always had an 
unquenchable curiosity to break the seal, to 
tear aside the veil, to find some cranny or 
crevice through which one might peep into that 
spirit realm. Herein the divine wisdom of the 
Scriptures appears as conspicuously in their 
silence as in their utterances. It is best, more- 
over, that here we "know only in part/' No 
heart is strong enough to bear the full revela- 
tion. None of us at the beginning could have 
borne the disclosure of his own future. In 
God's mercy the griefs and the burdens of our 
lives have come to us one by one, and, for the 
most part, without that continuous fear which 
must have attended a long foreknowledge. 

Even the levelation of the joys of heaven 
would be disastrous. In the presence of such a 
vision this poor heart must break from very 
excess of joy. It is a well-known fact that 
under the excitement of a great emotion at 
times the heart has suddenly ceased to beat, 
while at other times reason has been dethroned 
by the strain. Were the heavenly life fully 
revealed, earth must become either a morgue 
or a madhouse. When Moses prayed to God, 
"Show me thy glory," the desire was not grati- 
fied. The reply came, "No man can see God 



162 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

and live." That is true to the best philosophy 
of our day. 

Moreover, in the clear prospect of our heav- 
enly home — even could we bear it — the hard- 
ships and limitations of the present must by 
very contrast become intolerable, and fill the 
soul with yearnings for relief. Like the home- 
sick sailor boy, tossed about on the tempestu- 
ous ocean, so would the spirit of man droop 
for very homesickness and be unfitted for the 
duties of the present. It is well, therefore, 
that God's revelations of our future, both here 
and hereafter, are only partial and progres- 
sive. 

4^ ^ 1^ 

While, however, the gospel maintains such 
silence concerning the details of the life to 
come, yet, on the other hand, no religious 
teacher ever so magnified the importance of 
that future as did Jesus. From the beginning 
to the end of his ministry he emphasized the 
question, "What shall it profit a man if he 
gain the whole world and lose his own soul?'' 
In this the world's best thought to-day con- 
firms the wisdom of the Master. If man has 
any really great interests, they are spiritual 
rather than material, and extend beyond these 
few days of the earthly life. Without that life 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 163 

this loses its loftiest significance and inspira- 
tion. It is no wonder that skeptical philoso- 
phers often become pessimists and question 
whether life is worth living. On the other 
hand, one may possess one's soul in all pa- 
tience when confident that the everlasting ages 
are his own. In that faith he finds strength 
for his burdens, consolations for his griefs, 
inspiration for self-sacrifice, while every vir- 
tue appears reasonable. How small a matter, 
think you, must obscurity, or disappointment, 
or bodily pain, or poverty, or social neglect, or 
calumny, or the petty persecutions of a day 
appear to the quickened spirit gazing upon its 
endless years, and how impossible withal for 
such a one to give himself to that which is 
small or unworthy ! In the Epistle to the He- 
brews we are told that Christ was made our 
High Priest, "not after the law of a carnal 
commandment, but after the power of an end- 
less life." That sinless life was not ordered ac- 
cording to temporal laws and conventions. It 
was not a cunning adaptation to circumstances 
and the things that are seen; it was, rather, 
a life inspired by and adjusted to eternal 
realities, ordered "after the power of an end- 
less life." So too shall the disciple, as an heir 
of immortality, live on a plan far outreaching 



164 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

to-day and to-morrow and the day after. On 
the other hand, so soon as man comes to believe 
himself a mere animal, to perish with his de- 
parting breath, so soon and surely will he 
begin to live as a mere animal, barbarous and 
beastly. The Epicureans of old denied a fu- 
ture life, and with this as a leading doctrine, 
although their founder was abstemious, they 
themselves degenerated to such a depth of cor- 
ruption that the Eoman statesman Fabricius 
prayed that all the enemies of his country 
might be followers of Epicurus. 

^ ^ ^ 

While the Divine Wisdom has withheld from 
us minute detail concerning the future life, 
it has, however, most positively announced the 
fact and portrayed its character in outline. 
Both reason and revelation assure us as to 
what it is not. The Word tells us there will 
be ^^no night there J' In that spirit world we 
shall not need to pass a third of our time in 
the unconsciousness of sleep, for sleep is a 
function of the body, not of the mind. Neither 
shall we require it for rest. Here the body 
wearies and demands rest, but there the unin- 
cumbered spirit shall not grow weary. It is 
reasonable to suppose that with enlarged facul- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 165 

ties we shall have great work to do, yet our 
diligence shall prove — as the word itself 
originally signified — our eternal delight. Here, 
day after day, it is work, weariness, and worry. 
Observe for an hour the passing throngs on a 
city's street. How many haggard and care- 
worn countenances ! How many bodies bowed 
down with burdens and broken with disease! 
How many faltering footsteps of tired men 
and women, dragging themselves along life^s 
hard pathways for a little while! Soon they 
will all have disappeared — sinking down one 
after another by the wayside — perhaps glad to 
have done with it all and forever. But in that 
home of the freed spirit, needing neither sleep 
nor rest, with tireless and ever-enlarging facul- 
ties, we may expect to work out the Father's 
will in everlasting day. 

4$^ 4$» 4» 

And there will he no sorrow there. Here 
there are fountains of tears around all eyes, 
no cheek is dry. The first utterance of the 
infant's voice is a cry, and from the cradle to 
the grave there is perpetual lamentation. All 
nature is resonant with minor tones. The 
very winds, moaning through the trees, seem 
to voice forth the heart of burdened humanity. 



166 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

Even the holiest here are not exempt. Indeed, 
at times, it seems as if the best were called to 
suffer the most. But there, we are assured, 
"God will wipe away all tears from their eyes." 
There will be no dying there. Here death only 
is certain, and the earth has the aspect of one 
vast charnel house, the abode of many more 
beneath the soil than live upon its surface. 
Next to sin death is the most dreadful phase 
of this earthly existence. Unknown multi- 
tudes are all their lifetime subject to bondage 
in fear of death. No day is assured. No step 
but it is overshadowed with unknown risks. 
Death lurks in everything. It is in the air we 
breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, 
the raiment we wear. It courses secretly 
through the lifeblood. It haunts every place. 
Soon or late each one of us must face it. But 
to the Christian believer beyond death there is 
deathlessness, and beyond the passing clouds 
there is everlasting sunshine. Into those 
heavenly mansions the angel of death can 
never enter. There all is life — eternal life. 
And there will he no parting there. Here 

Friend after friend departs, 
Who liath not lost a friend? 

There is no union here of hearts 
That finds not here its end. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 167 

We have sat by the bedside and through 
filmy eyes watched as the departing spirit 
launched out on that unknown deep. Like 
ships on the far-off horizon of the great ocean, 
so they faded away in the dim distance. No 
voice or voyager on that mysterious ocean has 
ever returned to whisper a syllable of assur- 
ance to our aching hearts. O ! this world had 
been a different world to us since that dread 
hour. Every day our hearts have gone out 
toward them with unspeakable yearning. In 
the darkness and in the day the prayer has 
been lifted, "O God ! that we may come to them 
again !'' And our experience has been the uni- 
versal story. The partings of this earthly life 
have made our sweetest friendships fountains 
of bitter tears, and the greater the joy of one 
the deeper the grief of the other. Well, in 
some glad hour, not long hence, we shall meet 
them, never to part again. With reasonable 
faith we may sing, 

"So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still 
Will lead me on 
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till 

The night is gone, 
And with the morn those angel faces smile. 
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!" 

"And there shall be no more death, neither 



168 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any 
more pam : for the former things are passed 
away.'' 



♦ *> ♦> 



Finally, among the negative aspects of that 
future life there is one that explains and 
crowns all the rest — there will he no sin there. 
Sin is the source of all our suffering, but sin 
cannot enter there. The earthly life has been 
one long tragedy of evil. Here sin has entered 
every heart, diminished every joy, enslaved 
every faculty, stained every character, blighted 
every home. Sin — sin — has been our greatest 
hurt. We have suffered, God only knows how 
griCA'ously, from our own sins and from the 
sins of others, suffered and wept bitter tears. 
God knows it all. But into that world of re- 
deemed spirits there shall not enter "anything 
that defileth," nor anything to hurt or make 
us afraid. There is no thought so grateful to 
the heart bowed down under the burden of its 
own sins or the sins of others, no longing so 
deep, as the cry of the quickened spirit for that 

sinless estate. 

^ ^ ^ 

But heaven is more than a condition of ne- 
gations. Both reason and revelation assure us 
of certain positive features as well. We may 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 169 

expect it to be a state of enlarged manifesta- 
tions. Here "we know only in part." We see 
through a glass darkly. We grope about in 
a twilight world. With an insatiate hunger 
for knowledge, mystery enshrouds us on every 
side. It mocks us, it laughs in our faces, it 
baffles our cunningest efforts, it fills our little 
life with disappointments and fears. To our 
shortsighted vision this world is a masked 
world and one of infinite misunderstandings. 
Before this seeming of things it has been 

Hard to work for God, 

To rise and take his part. 
Upon this battlefield of earth, 

And not sometimes lose heart. 

Here our trembling faith is confronted with 
a strange maladjustment of men and things: 
sin triumphant through the ages, falsehood 
and vice robed in royal purple, while virtue 
and truth lie prostrate ; shams riding in state 
while genuine merit plods wearily along on 
foot. But we are assured this is not to en- 
dure forever. There in that heavenly world, 
and in that day of the revelation of all things, 
all lives, all characters in the blazing light of 
infinite justice will take on their true values. 
Then too we shall have cleared up to us many 
a mystery of our own lives — mysteries which 



170 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

have sorely tried our faith and for a time, per- 
haps, embittered our hearts with the spirit of 
murmuring. There we shall "know, even as 
we are known," and in the larger life be able 
to see that the "Lord doeth all things well." 
As we think over it the clouds gather thick 
and dark over our pathway — how the best 
purposes apparently have been thwarted, 
prayer unanswered, persecution malignant 
and hurtful permitted, and the life ordered 
along pathways so strangely different from 
our own choosing and our own best judgment. 
There we may believe these dark sides of God's 
providence will all be illumined with the radi- 
ance of divine love, and we shall rejoice with 
joy unspeakable over all the way the Lord 
hath led us. This hour 

If we could push ajar the gates of life 
And stand within, and all God's workings see. 

We could interpret all this doubt and strife. 
And for each mystery could find a key. 

Moreover, with enlarged manifestation, heaven 
will offer us a breadth and richness of fellow- 
ship unknown in the earthly life. 

The communion of saints without a shadow 
or a suspicion. Human tongue may not tell 
the bliss of pure spirits dwelling thus in un- 
disguised fellowship, no misinterpretation, no 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 171 

fear, no sinister motive, no self-defensive bars 
and bolts between. Earthly associations are 
a very limited affair at best — by very necessity 
a matter of careful calculation and many 
definitions. In this earthly society separation 
and silence are the safeguards with which each 
soul must encase itself if it would escape suf- 
fering. Moreover, if one would, yet one cannot 
communicate to another his deepest and his 
best experiences. We communicate only com- 
monplaces. Human language and human ac- 
tion are but the attempts of an infant to ex- 
press the soul's profounder thought and love 
and life. They utterly fail to bridge the chasm 
between. Such was the thought of Tennyson 
when he wrote: 

But what am I? 
An infant crying in tlie night: 
An infant crying for the light, 
And with no language hut a cry. 

To-day science affirms that no particle of mat- 
ter absolutely touches any other particle. Sus- 
pend from the ceiling a chain, and to the free 
end of that chain attach a weight of twenty 
thousand tons, yet even then, no link of the 
chain will come into immediate contact with 
any other link. An attenuated film of ether 
will still intervene between them. As with 



172 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

those material atoms, so with souls. They live 
forever apart — unmeasured distances one from 
the other. There in that home of the soul we 
may hope to come into far more intimate and 
unalloyed communion with the good. To the 
redeemed spirit, the crown of the heavenly 
life will be eternal fellowship with Christ. We 
cannot measure the bliss of bathing forever 
in the sunlight of infinite love. Bui we shall 
behold the King in his beauty and be "forever 
with the Lord." 

Here in the body pent. 

Absent from him I roam, 
Yet nightly pitch my moving tent 

A day's march nearer home. 

i$e H$» ^ 

Now, it is a blessed truth revealed in these 
scriptures and experienced in many a believer's 
heart, that heaven does not lie all heyond the 
grave. We need not die to have heaven. The 
greatest of the apostles declares that we may 
now and here enjoy the "earnest of our inherit- 
ance.'' That word "earnest" in the old English 
was a law term. Among our forebears, it was 
customary for the seller of real estate to pass 
to the purchaser a handful of soil as a part or 
earnest of the whole. So heaven in the heart of 
the believer is the earnest — the foretaste — of 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 173 

that into the complete possession of which he 
shall come hereafter. Bunyan's pilgrim had 
three special foretastes of paradise. From the 
House Beautiful he saw the Delectable Moun- 
tains. Then, again, from the Delectable 
Mountains he caught a glimpse of the Celestial 
City, and finally in the Land of Beulah he 
heard the voices of them that dwell therein. 
The allegory limits that experience to three 
occasions, but the gospel of Jesus Christ im- 
poses no such limitations. Amid those won- 
derful yisions on Patmos John saw "heaven 
coming down to earth." In this he summed 
up the whole meaning of the gospel. It 
was Christ's mission among men not only 
to bring life and immortality to light beyond 
the grave, but also to make this earth the 
vestibule of heaven. He came to establish 
the kingdom of God among men. Heaven 
here, in our hearts and homes, is to be to us 
more and more the conscious evidence of a 
heaven hereafter. When, a few days hence, 
as our feet are slipping o'er the brink and 
the spirit is about to take its flight, then may 
it be our blessed experience, as it was that of 
John, to look and behold a door opened in 
heaven. 



XI 
SKEPTICISM 

Our doubts are traitors, 
And make us lose the good we oft might win, 
By fearing to attempt. — Shakespeare, 

He fought his doubts and gathered strength. 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the specters of the mind 

And laid them: thus he came at length 
To find a stronger faith his own. 

— Tenivyson. 



XI 
SKEPTICISM 

After the resurrection of Jesus we are told 
that his disciples went away into Galilee, as 
Jesus had appointed, and when they saw him 
they worshiped him, "but,'' says Matthew, 
"some doubted.'' This admission of doubt on 
the part of some of the disciples is evidence of 
the integrity of the sacred writers; being so 
confident of their own honesty and the facts 
in the case, with transparent simplicity they 
record the fact of such doubt. 

To believe is more natural for man than to 
doubt. A little child begins with believing 
everything and everybody. It is only after he 
has been deceived either by his own judgment 
or the acts of others that he learns to doubt. 
And from early childhood to old age, with 
increasing experience, the process is one of in- 
creasing doubt in many directions. We may 
say, therefore, that while faith is prior and 
more natural, doubt is also an inevitable conse- 
quence arising from experience. 

177 



178 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

In the domain of religion an attitude of 
doubt may spring from vicious early educa- 
tion, evil association, perhaps a pernicious 
book, and the effect more easily arises where 
there is a constitutional tendency to suspicion. 
These and many other special influences enter- 
ing an individuaFs life may obscure the truth 
to him, warp the judgment and seriously viti- 
ate the character. There are, moreover, cer- 
tain more general influences which conduce to 
this attitude of religious doubt, not only in the 
individual but as a pervasive characteristic of 
a nation or of an epoch. Among such we might 
adduce the unwise dogmatism of the churchy 
especially in former times. Extremes always 
excite reactions. Extravagant creeds must 
arouse antagonism leading to the opposite ex- 
treme of unbelief. While this offensive fact in 
the history of the church must be candidly 
confessed and deplored, it should also be re- 
membered that dogmatism has featured all 
human conduct and creed. Human nature is 
itself dogmatic. For this reason all its social, 
scientific, and political constructs built on too 
narrow foundations have required continual 
amendments. The truth, though intolerant, is 
never tyrannical. Like law, it is the condition 
of completest freedom, but man's interpreta- 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 179 

tion and use of the truth, in civil society, in 
science, and in religion alike, have often been 
unjust and cruel. Every school of thought, 
every government has had its popes and inqui- 
sitions and martyrs. To-day there are as bit- 
ter antagonisms between the different schools 
of medicine as exist between the most inimical 
sects, while the rancorous debates of the 
Eeichstag outrival the wrangles of the Middle 
Ages church councils. So dogmatism is by no 
means confined to religious bodies. Tolera- 
tion, it is true, began somewhat earlier in the 
domain of science than in that of religion 
— ^very reasonably so, since the profoundest 
beliefs are and ought to be the very last to be 
altered or relinquished. Man's religious be- 
liefs, involving the deepest interests and affec- 
tion of his being, even though tainted with 
error, should therefore be changed with ex- 
treme slowness. 

With such palliations of its errors in the 
past, we must still confess that the church has 
seriously suffered from the undue dogmatism 
of its exponents. It has attempted too many 
ultimate definitions. Learned church councils, 
with a zeal beyond their knowledge, essayed 
to cast all thought into one mold, substitut- 
ing ecclesiastical opinion for the simple Word, 



180 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

then foisting it upon the Avorld as the essen- 
tials and of equal authority with the ''Thus 
saith the Lord." 

In their impatience for the conquest of the 
world, religious zealots have been satisfied to 
enforce outward conformity and intellectual 
assent without the accompaniment of a holy 
life. Such dogmatism has appeared in an un- 
warranted application of Scripture to the 
minute details of human conduct, and also 
to the interpretation of natural phenomena 
outside the realm of morals and religion. 
What a history of absurdities has been written 
upon the subject of religious duties! Tylor 
in his History of Primitive Culture tells us 
that when a Hindu gapes he must snap his 
thumb and finger and repeat the name of some 
god. He has been taught that to neglect this 
is as great a sin as to murder a Brahman. 
The Greek historian Xenophon narrates how 
the entire Greek army on the march was 
halted, and prayer offered up when a certain 
soldier on the dusty highway was seized with 
a fit of sneezing. Childish as these delusions 
appear, they are hardly more so than many 
duties read into the Scriptures by learned 
ecclesiastics in later times. We need only 
recall that mass of precepts which the Jewish 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 181 

doctors had collected about the Old Testa- 
ment at the time of the advent. Among the 
thirty-nine kinds of work which the rabbis 
taught should not be done on the Sabbath day 
we find that shoes with nails in them should 
not be worn, for that would be carrying a bur- 
den. Neither should persons tread upon the 
grass on the holy day, lest they should trample 
on a stray kernel of grain and that would be 
a species of harvest work. The over scrupu- 
lous Pharisees found in Christ's miracles of 
mercy on the Sabbath day conclusive evidence 
against his Messiahship. 

In later days the question as to the proper 
time of celebrating Easter was believed to in- 
volve the issue of personal salvation or damna- 
tion. In the fourteenth century, after lengthy 
and learned debate at Constantinople as to the 
nature of the light at the transfiguration, those 
who refused to believe it uncreated were de- 
nied Christian burial. In this excessive ap- 
plication of Scripture to the details of human 
conduct the Roman Church even assumed to 
make discriminations in the guilt of various 
sins. So we have them catalogued and the 
tariff price of each officially sanctioned by the 
church. The historian Froude enumerates cer- 
tain examples. For the sin of sacrilege one must 



182 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

pay ten shillings and six pence; for simony, 
the same amount; for taking of false oaths, 
nine shillings ; for burning a neighbor's house, 
ten shillings; for murdering a layman, seven 
shillings and six pence; but for even laying 
violent hands on a priest, ten shillings and six 
pence. These and many others are specified 
and their money value given with the seal of 
an infallible Pope attached. 

Rome, however, has not been the only trans- 
gressor in such matters. The historian Buckle 
exposes in like manner to ridicule what he 
styles "the invented sins of the Scottish 
clergy." For a Scotchman to step foot in a 
Roman Catholic country was denounced as a 
sin. For a town to hold market on Saturdav 
or Monday, for a Scotch woman to live alone 
or with a married sister were pronounced sin- 
ful. Even the Christian must beware of enjoy- 
ing his dinner, for that would be indulging his 
carnal nature. 

The record of our own New England forbears 
is not free from such criticism. To their dog- 
matism in the interpretation of scriptures are 
doubtless due the numerous "isms" and skep- 
ticisms which have marred the otherwise splen- 
did history of New England. It is always a 
sad blunder for an institution or an individual 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 183 

seeking permanent influence to profess too 
much. Derogatory reaction is sure to follow. 
The church in its efforts to be wise above what 
is written has unquestionably occasioned much 
of past and present skepticism. In like manner 
the effort to give the sanction of Scripture 
to this or that scientific theory has often proved 
injurious, for with the increase of knowledge 
and the abandonment of such theories men 
have lost confidence also in the teachings of 
the church and in the entire word of revela- 
tion. 

Yet another potent factor in occasioning the 
skepticism of our day is to be found in its 
idolatry of freedom. Liberty is the talismanic 
word of modern times through which man is 
to achieve all good and avert all evil. This 
generation will call no man master. It has 
little reverence for authority in state or 
church, in family or school. It is democracy 
run to seed. In the schools this appears in the 
wildest denials of the sacred beliefs of the 
centuries. In the home circle it manifests 
itself in the lack of parental discipline and 
the self-assertion of the young and ignorant. 
In the state it crops out in such absurdities 
as socialism, communism, nihilism. In the 
church it eschews all creeds. It may indeed 



184 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

be looked upon as a mark of genius for the 
young man with his mental requirements yet 
resting lightly upon him first of all to run a 
wild hari-kari among the creeds, cutting and 
thrusting, it matters not where, only that he 
free himself from the common faith. The li- 
centious freedom of our age thus glorifies self- 
assertion first, last, and always — to take noth- 
ing on trust but one's own ignorant self. 
While accepting the vast improvements and 
accumulations of economic value coming down 
to us in the past, these religious libertines 
would fain cast away the a-b-c, religious con- 
cepts and experiences of the ages. Any life 
thus lacking faith foundations cannot be other- 
wise than degenerate. No one has portrayed 
the ruinous effect more forcibly than did 
Goethe, who says, "Epochs of faith are epochs 
of fruitfulness, while, on the other hand, 
periods of unfaith, however glittering, have 
uniformly proven periods of decrepitude, bar- 
ren of all great achievement.'' Fickleness is 
a sure sign of weakness, yet nothing has 
been more characteristic of infidelity and its 
exponents. From age to age it has been as 
changeable as the chameleon. The histories 
of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Eenan furnish con- 
spicuous examples, alternately blessing and 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 185 

cursing Christianity. There too was Strauss, 
the very coryphaeus of modern infidelity. 
Starting at Tubingen, he was a disciple of 
Schelling; then he passes through a period of 
religious mysticism; shortly after he becomes 
an enthusiastic admirer of the evangelical 
Schleiermacher ; then with childish supersti- 
tion he is interested in the marvelous visions 
of clairvoyance, until with pendulum swing 
he sways from the stream of credulity to radi- 
cal skepticism. It is safe to say that a mind 
of such cast has little qualification for the 
writing of a true life of Christ. 

This false conception of freedom has passed 
beyond loose theories to looseness in private 
and public morals. The action of creed and 
character upon each other is reciprocal. As 
the want of correct faith eventuates in weak 
character, so, on the other hand, decay of pub- 
lic and private morals works degradation in 
the ideals of a community. Our system of 
thought is thus often only the history of our 
hearts and an afterthought and apology for 
our acts. Bacon long ago wrote to the same 
effect: "None deny there is a God but those 
for whom it maketh that there were not God." 
Our practices thus become the fathers of our 
opinions. Infidelity is seldom born of the 



186 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

logical faculties. The words of Holy Writ are 
true, "This is the condemnation, that light 
is come into the world, but men loved dark- 
ness rather than light, because their deeds were 
evil." Rousseau, who could not with any de- 
gree of patience read the austere laws of 
morality enjoined by Jesus, yet confessed that 
he "found in the reasonings of a certain woman 
with whom he lived in the greatest intimacy 
all those ideas which he had occasion for." 

Henry VIII of England had lived eighteen 
years in peace with his wife Catharine of Ara- 
gon, and without any qualms of conscience on 
the ground that she had been previously es- 
poused to his deceased brother Arthur. But 
when once he became enamored with the 
beautiful Anne Boleyn, then suddenly new 
light shone upon that article in the Levitical 
law forbidding marriage with one so near of 
kin. Then his conscientious scruples troubled 
him, cost Wolsey his life, and stirred all 
Europe. Pope, cardinals, legates, learned doc- 
tors of the law, and Parliament were all called 
upon to relieve the royal Henry from his pangs 
of conscience. 

The heart dictates our practical creeds, and 
when once it becomes corrupted the very wish 
that a questionable course of conduct were 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 187 

right recurring often to the mind goes far to 
make one feel it is right. 

The astounding revelations made of late in 
our country cannot but impress all thinking 
people that we are living in an age of fear- 
ful corruption. The low standard of personal 
honesty in public life is a sad spectacle in this 
land of the Puritans. Greed and graft seem 
to be an insane obsession of our age. Honest 
people are solemnly asking, whom can we 
trust? One of old declared all men are liars. 
Were he living to-day he might add, "and 
thieves also.'' The family altar too has been 
removed from multitudes of Christian homes, 
robbing the young of this generation of one of 
the strongest safeguards of virtue. The fear- 
ful laxity of law and of public sentiment upon 
divorce and the low estimate placed upon per- 
sonal purity among men all are making fear- 
ful inroads upon the sanctity of the Ameri- 
can home. It is this tainted atmosphere of 
easy virtue that is weakening the morals of 
the young. Even the Christian profession has 
measurably lost its meaning and is bandied 
about in the jest of the worldly. In conscious 
or unconscious conformity to the popular senti- 
ment, the troublesome truths of the Bible have 
been quietly dropped out from the peaceful 



188 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ministrations of the pulpit. Thus conduct in 
public and private has been reacting on our 
faith until what men do not believe has be- 
come quite as prominent and as potent as what 
they believe. 

If thus the low moral tone of practical life 
has been destroying the faith, it is equally true 
that a lofty integrity will also lift it. Skep- 
ticism is well-nigh impossible in the presence 
of a holy life. The church was organized on 
earth not primarily to carry down a creed, 
but to represent Christ, the Sinless One, so far 
as he may be represented in a regenerated hu- 
man character. The term "Christianity'' does 
not occur in the Bible. That is an abstract 
term and smacks of system. The Bible con- 
tinually speaks of "living Christ'' and "by 
Christ," and "in Christ," nay, more, in our 
measure, "living Christ." The highest en- 
comium to be passed of any of us is not that 
we are orthodox, though that is desirable, not 
that we are well versed in the Bible, though 
that also is an attainment excellent as it is 
rare, but, rather, that as disciples of the Mas- 
ter we live honest, unselfish, prayerful lives, 
not belying nor belittling our profession. 

In the Bonaparte Chapel of the Church of 
Saint Croce, in Florence, lie buried the mortal 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 189 

remains of Charlotte Napoleon Bonaparte. 
On her beautiful tombstone is engraven the 
simple inscription, "Charlotte Napoleon 
Bonaparte, worthy of her name." Skepticism 
would soon disappear from any community in 
which it could be truthfully said that every 
professing Christian lived worthy of his name. 
The world will honor the church and its 
creeds when they behold in its members the 
"mind which was in Christ.'^ When the New 
England churches admitted to their member- 
ship those who subscribed only to the "half- 
way covenant" then pews and pulpits became 
infected with infidelity, from the effects of 
which they have hardly rallied to this day. It 
is blessed truth that the most effective evi- 
dence for Christianity ever presented to the 
world has been placed within the reach of 
everyone. Example rather than argument is 
the supreme influence. One upon being asked 
under whose preaching he had been converted, 
replied, "Under the preaching of my mother's 
daily life." Every family, every church in 
their members may thus present to the world 
so many concurrent evidences both of the 
truth and power of the gospel of Christ, 
thereby making infidelity in their presence ap- 
pear almost a species of insanity. 



XII 

OUE WORK 

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; 
In feelings, not in figures on the dial. 
We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives 
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. 
Life's but a means unto an end; that end 
Beginning, mean, and end to all things — God. 

— Philip James Bailey. 

We may attain all the excellence of which humanity is 
capable while doing the simplest daily duties. — Thomas 
Hughes, 



XII 
OUE WORK 

Clearly^ man was made to work, and the 
world was made for him to work in. Indeed, 
if he would be a man, he must work. An idler 
is out of place in this world. Even the in- 
carnate Son of God came a laboring man into 
a laboring world, leaving as his first recorded 
utterance, "Wist ye not that I must be about 
my Father's business?" and as his last upon 
the cross, "It is finished." One of the most 
gracious results of Christianity has been to 
dignify and properly remunerate labor. Even 
to-day we venture to assert the great ground- 
swell of discontent disturbing the civilized 
world over the question of labor and its wage 
is the fruit of the gospel. 

And we are all doing something. Much of 

the burden of our work is to find out what 

we shall do and how we shall do it. Ages ago 

the Preacher, as you may find recorded in 

the book of Ecclesiastes, made an answer 

to these questions which has never been 

X93 



194 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

improved upon. He bids us, ^^Whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." 

Eeflecting upon his words, we are impressed 
first with the fact that it is not ours to choose 
our work. Men usually talk about selecting 
a trade or a profession as if it were a matter 
of their own convenience and liking as to what 
their life's work should be. The Good Book 
does not so represent it. Here we are told 
that an all-wise Providence is near to us, "in 
whom we live, and move, and have our being," 
though unseen yet ready to mete out to each 
his work according to divine plan and with 
unerring wisdom. It bids us reach forth an 
open, ready hand, and the Master will fill it. 
So WB are all colaborers with the Almighty. 
It may not be what the world calls great work, 
but it will surely be good work. It may not be 
what our worldly ambition craves, but it will 
surely lift us up to the stature of manhood. 
Drifting on the current of one's desires and 
delights never builds a virile and valiant char- 
acter. And it is well that it is not left for us 
to choose. We do not know how if we would. 
We need to go but a few steps in any direction 
to reach the limit of our knowledge. Besides, 
it is a matter of immortal moment what we 
shall do here in these few years. The world's 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 195 

work is on a broader plan than we are able 
to conceive, reaching far beyond to-day, to- 
morrow, and the day after. Man's petty per- 
sonal schemes must therefore miserably fail. 
Nothing is more foolhardy than to attempt 
life's work alone, nothing more pitiable than 
the sight of a mortal who ought to sweep the 
great deep with full sail, in spiritual blindness 
stooping to pick up the pebbles on shore and 
play with them as a thoughtless child would 
idle away a summer's day. Probation affords 
no such holiday. 

Moreover, in the light of this revealed truth, 
how useless to worry about our work! The 
heavenly Father knows better what the world 
needs than we do, and he knows us altogether 
— what we can do, and when and how we 
should do it. What if it often seems to us in- 
significant, we have but to do faithfully our 
part and the Lord will provide. He will make 
no mistake about it, either about our ability 
or the necessities of the case. Yet how many 
even Christian people go groaning about, 
troubled in spirit as to what they shall do! 
They forget that glorious name which the 
prophet of old was inspired to write, "and his 
name shall be called Counselor." Counselor — 
that should be the everyday name of Christ in 



196 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

our hearts. Human philosophy never brought 
humanity so consolingly near to the heart of 
the Infinite as that one word of revelation 
brings us. Are we disturbed, then, about our 
present or our future work, concerning its fit- 
ness, its utility, its righteousness, we have an 
infallible Counselor, who loves us better than 
we or our friends can love us, and who can 
insure our interests and the world's infinitely 
better than we are able. That Friend standeth 
at the door at the opening, and at every hour 
of the day. It is he who, with an infinite com- 
passion, bids, "Come unto me, all ye that labor 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'' 
In this connection observe the apparently 
sublime indifference expressed in that word 
'^whatsoever J' "Whatsoever thy hand findeth 
to do, do it." Everywhere we see people try- 
ing to do something for which they have no 
faculty, something greater than God by the 
endowments conferred upon them ever in- 
tended they should do, chafing at nature's 
charter for themselves, perhaps murmuring 
because he has given them such and so many 
little things to do, as if he had misjudged their 
capacity; misanthropes, embittered also with 
the world, because it does not take them at 
their own measurement of themselves. Thev 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 197 

very much fear their lives will be frittered 
away with only commonplace duties and deeds. 
They have yet to learn that the Almighty has 
really ordained that the weak things of the 
earth should confound the mighty. 

Even the church has but just learned that the 
world is to be redeemed through the children, 
although ages ago the words were emblazoned 
on the pages of Holy Writ : "Out of the mouths 
of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained 
strength." In that very hour when Jesus in 
the temple chided the long-robed priests, and 
bade them, "Suffer the little children to come 
unto me, and forbid them not,'' in that very 
hour the Christian Church should have insti- 
tuted the Sunday school. Yet it took seven- 
teen centuries for Christendom to apprehend 
the duty. 

So to our weak vision it is one of the per- 
plexing mysteries that God in his providence 
so often, and apparently prematurely, calls 
away the strongest workmen in the field. 
When he thus takes the feeblest human agen- 
cies to accomplish the mightiest results he 
leaves us no room for boasting over our part. 
Thus in divine wisdom did Christ estop the 
mouth of cavilers when with a word or simple 
touch he wrought his mighty miracles of mercy. 



198 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

Did not the Preacher have this feature of 
our worii in view when he wrote, "In the morn- 
ing sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold 
not thine hand : for thou knowest not whether 
shall prosper, either this or that, or whether 
they both shall be alike good" ? "Thou knowest 
not" — a hard lesson that for self-sufficient 
man. Belshazzar thought he knew the path 
to glory, till in that midnight revelry a strange 
hand wrote upon the wall, "Thou art weighed 
in the balances, and art found wanting." 

Solomon thought he knew the conditions of 
a successful life and plunged into all excesses 
of worldly lust and ambitions, sought its wis- 
dom, its power, its wealth and every desire of 
the flesh. Now, listen to him, as sitting down 
near upon the last milestone of his earthly 
journey and looking back over it all, in the 
language of profound disappointment he cries 
out, "Vanity of vanities ; all is vanity." 

And how little did Paul know what the 
"whatsoever" of his duty was to be until, be- 
fore the gates of Damascus, he lifted up the 
prayer, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?'' 
A man of resplendent genius, was he to stand 
before kings? Yes, but as a prisoner in chains, 
preaching righteousness and temperance and 
judgment to come. A scholar, was he to 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 199 

mingle with the philosophers? Yes, but "to 
count all things but loss for the excellency of 
the knowledge of Christ Jesus'' his Lord. An 
orator, but one whose tongue should be a 
tongue of fire as it was tipped with unction 
from on high, and whose only eloquence should 
be the simple story of the cross. Would you 
know the duties that Paul found in that word 
"whatsoever''? Gather them together as they 
lie scattered in single sentences all through 
the Acts and the Epistles. They tell us he 
found duty in afflictions, distresses, stripes, 
imprisonments, tumults, labors, watchings, 
fastings, longsuffering, dishonor, evil re- 
ports ; he was unknown, chastened, sorrowful ; 
possessing nothing, in labors more abundant, 
in stripes above measure, in prisons more fre- 
quent, in deaths oft; received of the Jews at 
five different times forty stripes save one, 
thrice beaten with rods, once stoned, thrice 
suffered shipwreck, a night and day he was in 
the deep, journeying often, in perils of water, 
of robbers, in the city, among false brethren ; 
weary, in pain, hungry, thirsty, cold, and 
naked. Such was the "whatsoever" of Paul's 
duty — far different from what he or his friends 
would have chosen for him as, in the morning 
of life, the brilliant young genius sat at the 



200 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

feet of Gamaliel, the greatest teacher of his 
people. Nevertheless, it was the pathway of 
duty and the pathway of glory. Now, catch 
the words of the grand old Panl, when, reach- 
ing the summit of the Delectable Mountains, 
his silver hair floating across his brow as beams 
of the coming morn, his eye gleaming with 
rapture in full view of the promised land, his 
enraptured soul breaks forth, "I have fought 
a good fight, I have finished my course, I have 
kept the faith : henceforth there is laid up for 
me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, 
the righteous judge, shall give me at that day.'' 
Such was Paul's last judgment; and, be as- 
sured, those serious estimates of the world and 
its works which rush in upon the reflecting soul 
during its last days are generally quite correct. 
Notice, moreover, how the Preacher designates 
these whatsoever duties. He exhorts, "In the 
morning sow thy seed." The similitude is a 
very apposite one. Our deeds and our duties 
are the seeds sown for the harvest of the after 
life, and are fruitful beyond all calculation. 
If we could but see in panoramic view a single 
deed with all its train of consequences from 
now until the hour of destiny, how grand be- 
yond our loftiest conceptions would be a day 
of holy work. The deed multiplies itself in 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 201 

grand geometric ratio and herein lies the im- 
portance of doing whatsoever the hand findeth 
to do. 

Then, too, the process from seed to fruit is 
mysterious and often delayed. This mystery 
in spiritual growth, and this delay in apparent 
results, how sorely it tries our little faith! 
Yet how much better to take to ourselves the 
full assurance of faith and cast our bread upon 
the waters, trusting to find it after many darys, 
believing that "he that goeth forth and weep- 
eth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless" — 
without a doubt — "come again with rejoicing, 
bearing his sheaves with him." 

Then, again, there is the fact that the seeds 
are small, and men do not like to work with 
small means, so they are forever trying to re- 
verse God's order in nature, casting the seed 
aside and planting great oaks instead of little 
acorns. It is so much more honorable in the 
eyes of men to do large things, yet this is not 
God's method. He has scattered the world 
full of little living seeds, and men are wise to 
use them and reap great harvests. If he has 
in like manner strewn our every pathway with 
little opportunities, then our days should be 
full of little duties done, and fruit will come 
of it, even an hundredfold increase in the pres- 



202 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

ent life and in the world to come life ever- 
lasting. Such fidelity in the least things, be- 
lieve me, is heroic. The age of bloody sacrifice 
has passed away, yet not so the age of martyrs. 
It is unto a living sacrifice that we are called 
to-day. Said the Great Teacher, "Ye are my 
friends/' that is "my martyrs" — as the original 
reads — "if ye do whatsoever I command you." 
And this is a harder test than martyrdom at 
the stake. Many a man has died for the truth 
who did not have strength to live for virtue. 
To die was the struggle of a supreme moment, 
to live the trial of lingering, tempestuous 
years ; to die demanded moral courage, to live 
required Christian fortitude. Now, to this 
martyrdom, this wrack of a single day's life, 
clean and sweet and consistent, to this Christ 
is calling us. How few of us can endure this 
test! It is a severe ordeal, yet with the help 
of divine grace it comes within the ability of 
everyone, for nothing is simpler than good- 
ness, and nothing so completely in the power 
of everyone as duty. There will always be dif- 
ferent opportunities and capacity among men, 
but Christianity makes it possible for anyone 
in the performance of the most common duties 
to be a most uncommon Christian. No man 
ever taught so profoundly as did Jesus, yet no 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 203 

one ever spoke more simply. No man ever 
lived so perfect and beautiful a life, yet none 
ever so faithfully performed the least and even 
menial duties of life. 

There is yet another feature of similitude 
used by the Preacher which makes it very ap- 
propriate. Seeds are very numerous as well 
as small. So the "whatsoever" of his theme is 
a word of suffocating abundance. "Whatso- 
ever thy hand findeth to do.'' What diligence 
will suffice to measure its content? That 
"whatsoever" compasses every walk of life, its 
every thought, desire, and purpose. It com- 
mands every moment. Each hour comes to us 
freighted with seeds of opportunity and bless- 
ings. Each should be returned to our Lord 
laden and crowned with fruit. The heart 
faints before the fullness of duty in that one 
word "whatsoever" until it hears the divine 
voice only saying, "Come unto me, all ye that 
labor," then with the majestic faith of Paul it 
shouts, "I can do all things through Christ 
who strengtheneth me." Be sure if we as in- 
dividuals ever rise to this blissful assurance 
of the great apostle, it will be in faithfully do- 
ing all the numerous little and large duties 
as they come. 

So, too, the church, if it would gather around 



204 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

its altars the teeming populations of the fu- 
ture ages, must face and do its duty in what- 
soever the hand finds to do. It will be a 
church not only of oTand cathedrals and ele- 
gant services, but also a church of the high- 
ways and hedges, whose membership — clergy 
and laity — shall do humble service with the 
Master seven davs of the week down along the 
dustv highwavs of lowlv life. I do not imagine 
the church of the future will differ essentially 
from that of to-day in its doctrines. Its su- 
perior glory will consist in the richer baptism 
of the Spirit, in a profounder personal conse- 
cration and in the broader scope of its work. 
The temple of the future will be open seven 
davs of the week as a fountain of saving in- 
fluences and Christly benefactions, while its 
simple catholicity and unselfish devotion of 
person and power to the salvation of man will 
put to shame the petty divisions and half- 
hearted service of to-dav. 

Yet another feature of the work suggested 
by this text is quite as important. It is the 
near work — ''just at hand'' — whatsoever thy 
hand findeth to do. Bv this I understand our 
duty belongs to the present hour. Indeed, this 
alone is possible. We cannot do to-morrow's 
work if we would. We must get the added 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 205 

strength of to-day for the larger work of to- 
morrow. Neither our present capacity nor 
our circumstances will permit our doing it 
now. The Creator has given us a life of as- 
cending gradations. We must go up step by 
step — to-day one and to-morrow another — 
until by and by we shall have reached some 
Mount Nebo, where God shall whisper to 
the soul : "It is enough ; no more toiling on the 
earth. Come up higher." We cannot, there- 
fore, afford to lose the opportunity of to-day. 
The sooner we cease to dream and begin to do, 
the better. God's life is an eternal now. The 
commands of the Bible refer to the present. 
Dreams and good purposes for the future are 
not enough. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to 
do, do it. The most efficient Christians are 
those who, in view of that great future, make 
the most possible of the present. The true 
measure of our life is what we are and what 
we are doing — not what we intend to be and 
do in some indefinite future. Splendid plans 
are often the specious devices of Satan to cheat 
us out of good solid work in the present. It 
is our duty not to stop until we have settled 
and solidified truth into principle, and from 
principle passed it through purpose into the 
practice of our daily life. 



206 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

Furthermore, while we may not selfishly 
choose our work, and while it is of suffocating 
abundance, and while it is near at hand, we 
are not to go at it blindfold. The text reads, 
^^Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do." This 
implies that we on our part are to seek after 
the work. God does not thrust us into it. 
Neither does he intend that we should go 
through life drifting hither and thither and al- 
ways stumbling into our work. There must be 
prayerful and persistent seeking. We must 
find ourselves and our place. Most grievous 
failures are due to ignorance here. With all 
intensity we are to pray, ^'Thy kingdom come," 
while at the same time with the dawn of every 
day we ask the question, ^^Lord, what wilt thou 
have me to do?" We are to aim both to be 
good, and good for something. It is said that 
Luther rudely carved on the lintel of his study 
door the three words, '^Bete, dann arheite^^ — 
^'Pray, then work," and God honored that 
creed with the mightiest religious reformation 
in the Christian centuries. 

The text, moreover, clearly tells us how we 
shall do our work. ^^Whatsoever thy hand 
findeth to do, do it with tliy might.'' That 
means that we do it promptly. This we gather 
from the context, "for there is no work, nor 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 207 

device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave 
whither thou goest.'' It declares that the time 
is short, the opportunities are passing, and 
once gone are an eternal loss; therefore what 
thou hast to do, do quickly. It enjoins the 
habit of prompt obedience. At times we are 
inclined to quarrel with duty and try to argue 
it away. We take sides with our own selfish- 
ness and then dispute, inch by inch, with con- 
science. So duty becomes a task. Judging 
from the course of some, their whole lives 
would seem to be spent in complaining of their 
lot. Paul was an illustrious example of prompt 
obedience. When the light broke in upon his 
soul at the Damascus gate, how quickly he 
came to the question, "Lord, what wilt thou 
have me to do?'' Keligion with him meant 
vastly more than subscribing to a creed and 
joining a church. And with what promptness 
he went to the work. In that letter to the 
Galatians, written some fourteen years after- 
ward, he tells us, "But when it pleased God 
... to reveal his Son in me, that I might 
preach him among the heathen ; immediately I 
conferred not with flesh and blood: neither 
went I up to Jerusalem to them which were 
apostles before me.'' The church to-day needs 
this Pauline type of "immediate" Christians — 



208 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

"the minute men'^ in the Lord's warfare. Ques- 
tion is reasonable, but perpetual debate over 
duty is sure evidence of moral Aveakness, for 
genuine religion is love, and love is not con- 
strained, neither is it inclined to dispute. 
Kather it is yielding, it is all submissive. With 
delight it leaps to do the will of its object. 
So shall the service of Christ be without con- 
straint, if his love dwell in us richly. And 
until we have come to this liberty, the liberty 
of ohedience ivithout debate ^ we may not ex- 
pect the joy of salvation. We may school our- 
selves, by the gxace of God, regularly to per- 
form religious duties, and, like Bunyan's pil- 
grim, go hobbling through life and never throw 
aside our crutches until we come to the brink 
of the river, yet our religion will prove to be 
the yoke of Christian duty rather than the holy 
joy of Christian love. 

Doing with our might is also doing the best 
tee know Jioio. At times we are inclined to 
slight our work, or some part of it. Certain 
duties are distasteful, hence neglected, while 
others excite all the enthusiasm of our natures. 
Some people have a great deal of formal re- 
ligion, but are of very weak morality. They 
may even grow very fervent in prayer while yet 
they are very slow to pay their honest debts. 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 209 

Such defects usually occur in small matters 
which we are prone to underestimate. Per- 
fection is made up of trifles, yet perfection is 
no trifle. The daily routine of the greatest 
among men doubtless seems to them in its de- 
tails quite insignificant. It is, rather, our duty 
to do as they do, and by the grace of God fill 
out these least things to the utmost limit of 
their value. God himself is the elaborator of 
infinitely small things. He has made a uni- 
verse of atoms so small and so filled them with 
the mystery of his own glory that man in his 
profoundest wisdom cannot fathom the depth 
of a raindrop. 

Finally, and above all, the word "might'' in 
the text must comprehend more than merely 
human strength. There is a spirit in man and 
the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him 
understanding. Our victories must come not 
by might nor b}^ power, but by the Spirit of 
the Lord of Hosts. With him we must do our 
work. This is the secret. This is all. Let us 
covet nothing so much as the power of a pro- 
foundly spiritual life. Better be the hero of 
a single virtue than conqueror of the world 
without it. To-day the church needs most of 
all a Pentecostal baptism of spiritual power. 
Not money so much, not learning, not num- 



210 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

bers, not position, but fire — fire from on high 
— the flame of the cloven tongues. And this 
it must have to burn sin out of the world. 
This is our might. When the Books shall be 
opened in the last day our fate as individuals 
may tremble in the balance, not because we 
have failed to do with our wealth and our 
learning, but because we have sought to do 
life's work without the mainspring of our 
might, the Spirit of the indwelling Christ. 



XIII 

OUE UNCONSCIOUS FAULTS 

It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be 
a judge in his own cause. — Pascal. 



XIII 

OUR UNCONSCIOUS FAULTS 

In one of the earlier psalms the writer asks, 
"Who can understand his errors?'' and at once 
adds the prayer, "Cleanse thou me from secret 
faults/' On account of that word "secret" we 
are apt to misinterpret the meaning of the 
latter clause. "Cleanse thou me from secret 
faults" is construed as a prayer to be delivered 
from sins which he had been secretly and con- 
sciously indulging. Yet, in the light of the 
immediate context it is clear that the sins 
from which he prays to be cleansed may have 
been neither secret — that is, hidden from the 
world — nor conscious on his part. He had 
been reflecting on the perfection of God's law, 
saying, "The testimony of the Lord is sure, 
making wise the simple." "The command- 
ment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the 
eyes." Then, as if by contrast, impressed with 
man's moral blindness, he asks, "Who can un- 
derstand his errors" — who of himself is a cor- 
rect judge of his moral condition? — "cleanse 

213 



214 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

thou me from secret faults/' those which may 
have escaped my own observation; save me 
from the ignorant and habitual practice of 
what is wrong. The psalmist's words suggest 
a brief meditation on our unconscious faults. 
We may regard sin as a state; then it is un- 
godliness, unlikeness to God as a being of ab- 
solute goodness, while as an act it is the willful 
transgression of moral law as revealed in God's 
Word and works. Both in character and con- 
duct we may be far removed from the righteous- 
ness of God, and be quite unconscious of our 
alienation. Indeed, the greater the separation 
the less intense will be the feeling of differ- 
ence. Just as the absent child may at the first 
feel keenly his absence from the father's home, 
yet in the lapse of years he will cease from all 
pain of separation, and even all longing for 
the distant and half-forgotten ones, so may 
the soul, wandering from its early innocence, 
cease to feel its loss and degeneracy. It is 
without God in the world and past feeling. 
It is a general law that we measure the large- 
ness of things by the slowness or suddenness 
of our approach to them. Hence a course of 
gradual declension, with no sudden surprises 
or leaps, may in time lead one to the perpetra- 
tion of diabolical crimes without any very 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 215 

painful scruples of conscience. Indeed, with 
great criminals there are no great crimes. 

There is no iniquity that degenerate man 
has not committed with a clear conscience. It 
is the office of the Divine Spirit to "convince 
of sin." Once banish him from the heart and 
all sin tends to become unconscious. It is to 
such experiences that Paul refers when exhort- 
ing his brethren, "to lay aside every weight and 
the sin which doth so easily beset" them, that 
is, such sins as have by habit come to set easily 
upon them, like a garment to which one has 
become accustomed and of whose presence and 
weight he is no longer conscious. This same 
Paul has been a victim of just such delusions. 
You recall his confession that when a proud 
Pharisee he boasted himself blameless, though 
haling innocent men and women to prison, but 
when enlightened and penetrated by the Holy 
Spirit, with humble contrition he confessed 
himself the "chief of sinners." 

By nature blind to the sinfulness of sin, it 
behooves us also to remember that the soul is 
exposed to many perilous influences. There, 
for instance, is inordinate self-interest^ for- 
ever magnifying our virtues and minifying our 
vices. It will not see ourselves as others see 
us. It flatters our egotism and often engenders 



216 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

bitterness in the heart because the world does 
not take us at our own exaggerated valuation. 
It also has many ready excuses for our failings. 
Under its colored lens, the same fault in our- 
selves seems not half so hideous as it does in 
our neighbor, Just as some diseases are ex- 
tremely offensive to others, though not to the 
one afflicted. This self-interest forever stands 
on the outmost boundary of our life, with an 
ever-present tendency to overreach a little. It 
often masquerades as a great principle, which 
must not be surrendered for an inch or an iota. 
Not seldom families have been disrupted, na- 
tions bathed in blood, churches divided under 
this pretense of lofty principle, suggested by 
self-interest. At times it seems to justify the 
individual in the most extreme expressions of 
passion, while at others it will cover up the 
grievous coveteousness under the guise of a 
prudent frugality. An inordinate self-interest 
will so fill the heart with vanity that those who 
claim citizenship in heaven, and profess to be 
followers of the meek and lowly Nazarene, hav- 
ing renounced the vain pomp and glory of the 
world, will yet lavish their best energies upon 
themselves, in the face of famishing poverty 
fare sumptuously every day, strut across life's 
little stage in the tinselry of stars and spangles, 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 217 

and yet have no sense of inconsistency in it all. 
It is striking how this self-interest perverts 
the property relations and rights among men, 
sanctifying any means which will make one 
rich the quickest. How it does play the casu- 
ist with conscience ! and if there be some slight 
compunction, sends it to the Bible, there to 
justify such criminal absurdities as commun- 
ism and the divine right of kings. History 
furnishes no more conspicuous example of the 
delusion self-interest may work than that pre- 
sented by the Christian people of the South on 
the subject of chattel slavery. There was a 
time when that iniquity was openly denounced 
in the Southern States, and measures were 
taken there, just as in New York and Massa- 
chusetts, to abolish the evil. One day, however, 
the cotton gin was invented, making cotton the 
king of commercial staples. Massachusetts and 
New York, producing no cotton, extirpated 
slavery. Throughout the cotton States slave 
labor became immensely valuable, and, as a 
consequence, grave moral opinions changed. 
Again self-interest played casuist with con- 
science, referred it to the Bible for conclusive 
evidence, and satisfied half a nation of Chris- 
tian people that a few words of personal curse 
pronounced away back in the days of the flood 



218 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

amply justified the "sum of all villainies," hu- 
man slavery. The foremost statesman of the 
North, alluding to slavery, once warned the 
people of the South that a matter of conscience 
could not be smothered forever, yet he, too, 
the mighty Webster, dazed with the glittering 
prospects of the Presidency, thereafter voted 
for the infamous fugitive slave law, then went 
home to face his constituents and urged them 
"to conquer their prejudices." 

This self-interest the more easily hides from 
us our weaknesses from the fact that we 
usually act from mixed motives. Several may 
conduce to the same outward act. A person 
may bestow alms, desiring to help the needy 
applicant, yet with more desire that his bene- 
factions be seen by others. Then self-interest 
flatters him with the memory of the best mo- 
tive, though it may be the weakest. So it filled 
the Pharisee of old with self-satisfaction when 
observing scrupulously the law of Moses, 
though at the same time it blinded him to the 
fact that an ostentatious pride was the chief 
incentive to the broad phylacteries and the long 
prayers at the corners of the streets. Much 
outward goodness may thus spring from fear 
of fashion rather than the fervent love of 
righteousness. Even one's church membership 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 219 

may be mainly conformity to the respectabili- 
ties of society rather than loyalty and love for 
the truth. 

Still another source of moral blindness is 
found in false education. In a very important 
sense our probation begins before we are aware 
of it. The forces which are to sway us in life 
have germinated before we were born, in the 
blood, the habit, and the social conditions of 
our forbears. So we take our first peep into 
the world through colored goggles, which na- 
ture furnishes us at birth. One begins the life 
journey with a reverent, tractable disposition, 
another is possessed of a legion of low pro- 
pensities, as devilish as the Magdalene's. Since 
our moral nature is first in the order of de- 
velopment, and most impressible in childhood, 
a vicious education then and there is the very 
knell of doom to upright character in after life. 
The low inconsistent religious life of a family 
imbues the young mind with a debased ideal 
of piety well-nigh unchangeable in later years. 
The worldly indulgences and stinted benevo- 
lences of a church will reproduce themselves 
generation after generation in its membership, 
though they be scattered to the ends of the 
earth. So the common practice of church 
members becomes the Bible of many. Imita- 



220 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

tion is one of man's strongest instincts. Under 
its influence a considerable part of his thought 
and conduct is only a complex of mannerisms, 
consciously or unconsciously copied, the rea- 
sons for which have never been examined. The 
young Hindu has the spirit of caste, so forged 
into the tissues of his mind through the tradi- 
tion of ages that all his relations to humanity 
are distorted. The young Fijian seizes his 
club, bludgeons his victim, and munches the 
human flesh without a thought of sin. In view 
of such diversity and contradiction among the 
moral judgments of men, a philosopher in our 
day has declared, "Man's conscience is a med- 
ley made up of one fifth fear, one fifth super- 
stition, one fifth prejudice, one fifth vanity, 
and one fifth custom," leaving no moral ele- 
ment whatever in it. 

It is, moreover, a significant fact that once 
given the sanction of conscience, the moral 
nature of man as enthusiastically toils for the 
false as for the true doctrine. Error has had 
perhaps more martyrs than truth thus far in 
the history of humanity. Persecutions and the 
endless wrangles of bigotry have largely sprung 
from vicious education. Philip II and Isabella 
the Catholic, we are told, inflicted more suf- 
fering in obedience to their consciences than 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 221 

Nero or Domitian in obedience to their lusts. 
This pernicious education, however, is not con- 
fined to home and the church only. In the 
sentiment and the usages of the age it comes 
to us with commanding sanction. Cicero pro- 
nounced the common consent of the nations the 
supreme standard of virtue. That Jesus with- 
out a moment's compromise both in deed and 
doctrine so loftily transcended the sentiment 
of his own and previous ages is one of the many 
evidences of his superhuman character. The 
pitiable frailty even of the world's loftiest lives 
has often disclosed itself in a weak submission 
to the vicious opinions of the age. At a time 
when persecution for religious opinion pre- 
vailed the great John Calvin yields his assent 
to the burning of Servetus. Zwingli with 
Mohammedan zeal girds on the sword to ex- 
tirpate heretics. Sir Matthew Hale condemns 
innocent girls to be burned for witchcraft. 
Blackstone commends torture for obstinate 
witnesses, while John Wesley and Samuel 
Johnson both pronounce witchcraft one of the 
fundamental evidences of Christianity. Yield- 
ing to the spirit of the age, we must confess 
that the church has in other centuries been a 
stumbling-block where it should have been the 
inspiration and leader of all high culture. But 



222 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

it should be noted this was the church, and not 
Christianity, yielding to the corruption of the 
age. Christianity as revealed in the life and 
doctrine of Christ has stood immovable and 
unalterable amid the tumult and tempests of 
human passions and opinions. Still further 
we may observe such subservience to debased 
public opinion has not been the weakness of 
the church alone. Schools of science as well 
as schools of theology have been tainted with 
bigotry and martyred innovaters. When the 
attempt was first made in England to intro- 
duce coal for fuel the House of Commons 
gravely petitioned the Crown in 1306 to pro- 
hibit the burning of it. Its sale was forbid- 
den, a commission was appointed to visit sus- 
pected houses and break up the furnaces of 
those found using it. Finally a law was passed 
making it a capital offense to burn sea coal in 
London. It took three hundred years to break 
away from the foolish prejudices against coal. 
It is less than one hundred years ago that 
persons were mobbed in England for attempt- 
ing to erect a sawmill on the ground that it 
infringed on the right of the laborer to cleave 
timber with a wedge. When Harvey an- 
nounced his discovery of the circulation of the 
blood not a single physician forty years of age 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 223 

admitted the theory. When Jethro Wood's 
cast-iron plow, which has been a saving of un- 
numbered millions, was first introduced it was 
received with unsparing ridicule. The facts 
illustrate the plain truth that intolerance be- 
longs to human nature and has disgraced all 
man's works in science, in the state and in the 
church. This surrender to public sentiment 
is perhaps the most conspicuous weakness of 
the church to-day. Within and without it is 
too true we all keep step to public opinion 
and march in obedient platoons to what the 
world says. In matters of reform and in the 
practice of personal piety we yield our in- 
dividuality, and while we nominally revere the 
moral law of the Book, yet we never allow it 
to make us very singular or separate from the 
crowd. 

Man may also be the victim of spurious vir- 
tues. Aristotle made virtue to reside in the 
mean between two extremes. Spurious vir- 
tues have been the exaggerations either too 
much or too little. Under the name of Chris- 
tian moderation we tone down and tone down 
our zeal to the coldest indifference, while at 
other times it becomes a blind fanaticism 
breaking forth in the bigotry of sect and perse- 
cutions. Paul for a time deluded his great 



224 PLAIN THOUGHTS 

soul with spurious virtue, confessing that when 
he was dragging the innocent to prison and to 
death he verily thought he ought to do these 
things contrary to Jesus of Nazareth. Zeal 
for the church or sect may pass with us as love 
for Christ and souls and truth. Fanatical 
zeal has disfigured every page of religious his- 
tory. It has been enjoined that we should set 
our affections on things above and in the ex- 
treme interpretation of this duty well-meaning 
zealots have risen into ecstasies, shouting, ^^No 
foot of land do I possess, no cottage in this 
wilderness,'' while sanctimonious poverty and 
even shiftlessness have been boasted of as 
Christian virtues. In the earlier ages multi- 
tudes forsook home and the proper industries 
of life to wander about as barefooted, filthy 
vagabonds, preaching self-denial, while others 
abjured the family relation, lived alone in re- 
mote cells and desert retreats in unnatural 
and useless life, thinking to please and to im- 
itate that Jesus whose whole earthly life 
was spent in the cities, and in the most busy 
benevolences among men. Perhaps two of 
the most dangerous movements of religious 
thought in our day are, first, the drift to 
utter looseness in doctrine, ignoring all re- 
straint and ridiculing creeds under the guise 



ON FAITH AND LIFE 225 

of Christian charity for difference of opinions, 
and, secondly, the exaggeration of the simple 
and valuable forms of worship into pompous 
rituals of saving efficacy. Charity and forms 
are both good, but the danger of the modern 
church is to be found in the extreme interpre- 
tation of these virtues, lest its liberality be- 
come licentiousness, and its excessive reliance 
on forms smother its spirituality. No virtue 
but Satan has counterfeited it. As the counter- 
feit is cheaper, so it is more abundant. It is 
a law of political economy that the baser metal 
always drives the better out of use. 

In view of these facts which I have thus 
briefly presented, namely, our natural blind- 
ness to the sinfulness of sin, the perilous in- 
fluence of self-interest, the passions, false edu- 
cation in early years, in society, in business, in 
the church, and in the false sentiment of the 
age, together with our liability to be duped 
and satisfied with spurious virtues — in view of 
these facts we cannot but feel, first, our im- 
perative need of a standard — a rule of life 
higher than the fickle and fallible human un- 
derstanding — and, secondly, the duty of rev- 
erently testing ourselves by it, with the devout 
prayer that we may be cleansed and kept from 
secret faults. 



AUG 16 1913 



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